Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

With the help of my still clamped left hand I got the right hand reattached to my right arm. That was easier, but the skin was torn and not all the nerve pathways wanted to get back in place. I flexed my right hand carefully, wiggled my fingers, and then broke the clamp off my left hand.

I managed to keep the cable from swinging so it wasn’t nearly as noisy. I curled up to free my feet. The Targets had actually made this easier on me by hanging me upside down. (Save for later: whoever had done this to me didn’t understand SecUnits or bots in general. They hadn’t known to look for the onboard weapons in my arms.)

Once I got my ankles loose I hung from the left hand cable. I could see more from this angle, that this was definitely a deactivated assembler. Shapes in the darkness looked like old pieces of scaffold, the thing like a looming tower was maybe a stack of large transport crates. This was somewhere underground, a huge shaft, maybe an excavation that had been intended for safe storage?

At the bottom of the shaft, thirty meters down, the light caught the gleam of bright red, orange, and yellow. Those were all warning colors, associated with hazards and safety. It might be an exit, so I swung over to another cable and started down. That was when I figured out something was really wrong with my left knee joint.

Five meters away I could make out pieces of a broken hatch or large seal striped with warning colors, that it was scattered on a pile of rubble above a cracked, partially caved-in surface. The stripes were an old kind of emergency/hazard marker paint, from before they made it able to send large data bundles to the feed and started using it for advertising. I scanned channels again, looking for a signal that might be very faint.

There it was. It was repeating, Warning: contamination in different languages. They were the Target languages, the Pre-CR ones that Thiago had assembled the translation module for.

My organic parts went cold. Oh, right. I’d found the original site of the alien remnant contamination.

Had the Targets who stuck me down here been hoping I’d be affected? Was I affected? I didn’t feel affected. I felt scared, and pissed off.

I also needed to get out of here. I started climbing back up, toward the light source.

I scanned for more warning stripes or marker paint that might indicate exits but I wasn’t picking up anything. Still no sign of any human prisoners, that was good. I made it all the way to the top, to where a temporary scaffold/platform had been installed to one side of the shaft, near the assembler’s interface housing. The light source was there, a self-contained safety globe attached to what was left of the hand rail. Parts of the platform had fallen off, but I was able to crawl along one of the assembler’s crane arms and then climb down to it.

I limped across the platform. This close, I could pick up the weak signal of the safety light’s warning, also repeating “caution” in multiple languages. I adjusted it to point up and saw the giant hatch overhead. There was fungal growth around the edges, that looked old and dried out. This area had probably originally been dug as a storage shaft for the Pre–Corporation Rim colony.

Had those colonists known what they were looking at when they found the remnant, or did they just know there was something freaky about it and that it was probably dangerous? The Adamantine colonists had stored their heavy equipment down here, after the supplies stopped coming and they hadn’t needed the assembler anymore, but had wanted to keep it safe just in case the abandonment was temporary. This shaft hadn’t been on the schematic of the surface dock, so this was probably under the other structure, the complex with the weird ribs that the alien remnant-contaminated Pre-CR colonists might have compulsively constructed before they all killed each other or melted or whatever.

This was really depressing already and it would be worse if I had been discarded down here with the warehoused equipment and shipping cases forever, like a broken tool.

The overhead hatch didn’t look like it had been opened recently, so there had to be another way in and out of here, an exit off this platform. The problem was, no part of the accessible wall looked like a hatch or a door. There were seamed panels, but no sign of a control, not even a manual handle.

Okay, let’s do this the smart way instead of the stupid way. I tilted the safety light down to point at the platform and looked at the battered surface. No dust down here to show footprints, but it was clammy and a layer of faint dampness clung to the metal. I got down and put the side of my head against the platform, as close to eye level as I could get, and increased magnification. Then I started cycling through all my vision filters, including the ones I’d never had to use before.

I was thinking about maybe trying to code a new filter when I caught it. Faint splotches crossed the platform from the far right end.

The panel over there looked like all the others but when I pried at the bottom with my fingers it moved. Nothing was holding it down except its own weight and I managed to shove it up enough to see a dark stone-walled foyer. It was real stone this time, not manufactured. It was lit by more wan safety lights strung along the ceiling, all singing “caution” in chorus, and there was an open doorway in the far wall. From the airflow and higher level of atmosphere, there was a good chance this area connected to a much larger space. I scrambled under the hatch and let it down slowly behind me.

I sat on the floor, having an emotion, or maybe a couple of emotions, while my organic skin went alternately cold and hot and my knee made disturbing clicking noises. Plus the disconnected neural pathways in my hand were pulsing.

Being abandoned on a planet + locked up and forgotten with old equipment + no feed access were my top three issues and it was a little overwhelming to have them happen all at once.

Hopefully the humans had taken the maintenance capsule back to the space dock and contacted ART. Now it would be focused on getting to the explorer to find its other humans. So… even if… ART and my humans probably thought I was dead, anyway.

Murderbot, you don’t have time to sit here and be stupid. I could already feel that the feed was active in this section and that was a relief, though there might be nothing on it except targetControlSystem. I cautiously established a secure connection.

Hey, is that you?

It was loud, right in my ear, and I almost screamed. It was a feed contact but so close it was like it was already inside my head. Who are you?

It said, I’m Murderbot 2.0 .

If this is going to be like one of those shows with the character trapped in a strange place and then ghosts and aliens come and mess with their mind, I just can’t do that right now. But I couldn’t ignore it. I mean, I guess I couldn’t. Ignoring stuff is always an option, up until it kills you. I said. You’re what?

I’m the copy of you. For the viral killware you and ART made. Come on, it wasn’t that long ago.

So ART really had deployed our code. Also, what the fuck? It had interrupted my secure connection and come right through my wall like it didn’t exist. I had killware in my head. It was my killware, mine and ART’s, but still, holy shit. I tried to focus on the important points but all I could think was You’re calling yourself Murderbot 2.0?

That’s our name . It was trying to shove a file into my active read space.

But our name is private . Wow, I cannot keep this file from opening. That’s not good.

Well, I didn’t have that restriction in my instruction set. And you need to stop talking for like a second and read this.