Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

I read the file. (Not like I had a choice.) It was called MB20Deployment.file and was a record of what 2.0 had done so far.

Right. Okay. Right. Things weren’t nearly as bad as they seemed. The explorer was permanently out of play and ART’s last three crew members were retrieved, plus some bonus Barish-Estranza survivors. But note to self: the next time you create sentient killware based on yourself, set some damn restrictions. (It had downloaded one of my private archives to that SecUnit. I mean, my new friend SecUnit 3 who if I actually get out of this alive, I’ll have to do something with, like civilize or educate it or whatever. Like what the humans originally wanted to do with me, except we all gave up on that.) Do you know where the humans are? My humans, the rest of ART’s humans? Did they get out of the surface dock?

I don’t know, but before we look for them we have to find TargetContact and neutralize it .

That’s not in your deployment directive . I was pretty sure of that, because I hadn’t known TargetContact existed until 2.0 had given me its report.

Yeah, I wrote a new directive .

Killware was not supposed to be able to alter its deployment directive, so that was disturbing. I had a moment of confusion and a little bit of terror that ART and I had designed it too well and my killware was maybe about to eat my brain. I didn’t know what I was about to say, but what came out was, I don’t feel so great .

Let me take a look, it said, and was suddenly all up in my diagnostics. I hadn’t run any yet, because I hadn’t had time, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

I said, Hey, hey, stop that. We don’t have time . I shoved to my feet. A projectile popped out of my back and I felt fluid leaking down. Have you got a schematic of this place? Are there cameras?

No, you didn’t give me any mapping code. And there’s no cameras.

I pressed my hands to my face.

But you have to see this . It was showing me annotations for feed and comm channels. You’d think these would all be active for targetControlSystem, right, but most of them aren’t. TargetControlSystem has control of the channels all through this part of this… I don’t know where we are, I guess it’s a building? But this section is being used by another system. And it’s sending a distress signal.

That was new. Distress signal? I checked the channel 2.0 indicated and found it. It was in an old Pre-CR LanguageBasic code: assistance needed , repeated at ten second intervals.

The “needed” was the key. If it had been assistance required or requested it would have been an indicator that it was sending to an entity within its own organization or network. “Needed” was begging, a plea to whoever was listening, help us, anyone, please .

(Yeah, it was really depressing around here right now.)

2.0 was still pushing information at me. It said, TargetControlSystem has cut off the sender’s outside access, so that’s why we couldn’t pick up the signal until we got inside here. And Sender hasn’t responded to my pings, so it may be trapped in send-only. You’re in its area of operation, that’s why I found you so fast .

I made a vague schematic of what I knew about the complex so far. Large structure on the surface, storage shaft below, lots of unknown space in the middle. I applied 2.0’s channel annotations and saw the section that it had marked as targetControlSystem’s must be in the upper levels and the surface structure. The shaft was cut off from comm and feed signals, and the UnidentifiedSender’s section was above the shaft, and reached up into the center part of the complex, woven in with TargetControlSystem.

Other me was right, it was strange that this other system was sitting here in the middle of everything, still active enough to be trying to send a distress signal. You want to contact UnidentifiedSender? I thought you wanted to kill TargetContact.

I think we should do that, too. But this is an anomaly .

Speaking of anomalies. I didn’t want to talk about it, but I probably should warn other me. I said, There’s a possibility I’ve been affected by alien remnant contamination . I showed it my video of the broken seal I’d found at the bottom of the shaft.

2.0 didn’t respond for a second. (Which was unusual because it had been responding almost as fast as I could complete a sentence.) Then it said, Diagnostics show structural damage and a sixty-eight percent performance reliability. That’s not so bad, considering.

I said, Alien remnant contamination isn’t going to show up on my diagnostics .

It said, You don’t know that .

Oh, for fuck’s sake, I can’t sit here and argue with myself all day.

UnidentifiedSender hadn’t accepted contact from 2.0, but then 2.0 was killware. Making contact could cause UnidentifiedSender to try and kill me, but 2.0 could just kill it back, so… And if it wasn’t hostile I could use it to try to reach ART or contact the humans. I checked my secure connection to the empty feed and sent a tentative ping.

The ten-second repeat stopped. The silence stretched to twenty seconds, then thirty. The assistance needed resumed again, but this time it wasn’t sending out into the void. It was sending to me.

It heard you, 2.0 said.

It had heard me, and now I had a direction. I shoved myself off the floor and staggered through the foyer to the next hatch.

The corridors and rooms were tunneled out of the rock, with safety lights semi-randomly mounted to walls. Empty, collapsed pressure crates were stacked in every corner. For a long time this section had been used for storage, just like the shaft. In the ceiling a track of lights had been embedded, the panels clouded or broken. There were decorative designs on the tops and bottoms of the walls, but writing had been scrawled over them. Most of it was illegible, even with Thiago’s language module. The floor had smelly stains. These are never good signs, in a place where humans live. Something terrible had happened here and it made creeping sensations on my organic skin.

I was not in great shape. Projectiles kept popping out of me as I limped along and the leaking was worse. Also, in Adventures in Living with Your Own Killware Cozied Up Inside Your Head, 2.0 had partitioned off a corner of my processing space. It would have worried me more if it wasn’t in there watching episode 172 of Sanctuary Moon .

I needed that processing space, especially with my performance reliability dropping, but what I didn’t need was 2.0 forgetting its directive and turning on me, so everything it did to retain its self-awareness was great. It probably needed some code patches but I wasn’t sure I could do it without ART, particularly now. I still had my pain sensors tuned down but the grinding in my knee joint was distracting and made me feel vulnerable and it just wasn’t a good time to make changes to active killware.

Then the corridor opened into a big hangar space, so big the safety lights were just spots in the shadows. I adjusted my filters again and made sure it was empty before I limped out into it. The hatch in the roof was large enough for mid-sized air craft. The floor plates were scratched and stained but I could still see faint lines and directional marks. More decorative art climbed the walls but it was faded and my eyes were starting to blur from trying to make it out. Rounded doorways opened into two stairwells in opposite walls, and next to the one on my right was a primitive lift tube that still had power. (There was no actual pod, just a gravity field that you’re supposed to float up or down in and having seen the accident stats in the mining installations that still used them, I’d rather detach another hand than get into that thing.)