Марта Уэллс - Network Effect

Arada turned to Iris. “I think I should mention… Perihelion told us why you were actually here, in this system.”

ART’s humans were taken aback. Iris exchanged a low-key version of an “oh shit” look with Kaede. Matteo said hopefully, “Um, you mean the deep space mapping?”

Were we going to have a problem? I really hope we wouldn’t have a problem. And I wish Arada hadn’t picked a moment when I was literally falling apart to bring this up.

Arada said, “We’re not corporates. Everything Perihelion told us was in confidence and we won’t betray it, or you.” She made a little gesture. “I know contracts are important in the Corporation Rim, so we could sign one saying that we won’t talk about anything we were told, or what happened here, if that will help.”

Ratthi looked doubtful. “Yes, but we’ll have to come up with some sort of explanation.”

Amena added, “Yeah, my second mom is going to want to know what happened and she’s not exactly easy to lie to.”

“Your second mom?” Kaede prompted.

“She’s the head of the— She was the head of the Preservation Alliance Council,” Amena explained. “Dr. Mensah. She was in the newsfeeds a lot in the CR—she was kidnapped by a corporate called GrayCris and rescued by a SecUnit on TranRollinHyfa, and there was a company armed ship that was attacked and another ship from a security corporate that got blown up.”

“Rescued by a…” Matteo trailed off and they all stared at me.

Which was not what I needed right now, cut off from the feed and ART’s cameras and my drones. I said, “ART, I thought you told them about me.”

ART said, I told them I had met a rogue SecUnit. I didn’t imply that you were every SecUnit ever mentioned in the newsfeeds .

I think I was every SecUnit mentioned in the newsfeeds during that time, but whatever. SecUnit 3 had stopped trying to pretend to be an appliance and was now watching in fascination.

“No, Peri didn’t…” Kaede exchanged a look with Iris again. “We heard a little about GrayCris going down but we weren’t really following the story…”

Matteo’s eyebrows tilted. “So the rumor that it was a rogue SecUnit on TranRollinHyfa—”

“Was true,” Ratthi finished. “I was one of the ‘unidentified conspirators’ who escaped and is to be held liable for ‘massive interference with commerce and property damage’ if I’m ever caught on that station again.” He shrugged. “So now we know things about each other.”

Iris thought it over, then lifted her hands. “Look, we can work all this out later. Can we agree for now that we’re all allies who keep each other’s confidences?”

“And we don’t like Barish-Estranza,” Matteo added.

“Agreed,” Arada said.

Thiago and Overse are here with the emergency medical kit. Great. I think I’m going to restart again.

I’m not going into detail because it was gross and involved a lot of leaking and removing projectiles and regenerating tissue the hard old-fashioned way with hand units and the emergency medical kit kept trying to spray everything with disinfectant.

At one point, Martyn, who was Seth’s marital partner and Iris’s second parent, got called in from Medical to consult. He was a bio expert, too, but was still in isolation getting decontaminated himself. “Hello,” he said, peering at us via a display surface ART had generated. “How many SecUnit friends does Peri have?”

Iris said, “No, Dad, this is the SecUnit Peri told us about, the one it was going to bomb the colony over.”

“Bomb the colony?” I said. We were still in the shuttle bay because they couldn’t move me, and I was lying face down, my head propped on my arms, while Thiago, Ratthi, and Kaede rebuilt the organic components in my back. It was a long process and humans kept wandering in and out to watch, but I had my pain sensors tuned down and ART had directly connected an isolation box to my interfaces so I could download my video and audio of TargetContact, and more importantly so ART could play Timestream Defenders Orion for me. ART had also told me that SecUnit 3 had finally figured out that it could walk around wherever it wanted now and was doing that. I thought Iris was confused about when the bombing the colony thing had happened. I said, “That was the distraction so it could retrieve you.”

“No, we were all in that maintenance capsule, the colonists didn’t know where we were,” Matteo said, pausing to make an adjustment to something. “Peri was going to bomb the colony with the armed pathfinders until they gave you up.” They picked up something (I suspect it was something that normally formed a vital part of my insides) and carried it off to show Martyn via the display surface.

I had trouble believing that, but then I barely had the cognition to understand Timestream Defenders Orion right now (which is admittedly a pretty low bar) so maybe I was misunderstanding. “Are you sure? That doesn’t sound right.”

ART hadn’t said anything, even to tell me how wrong I was, which was suspicious in itself.

Ratthi said, “Oh no, it was very clear about it. Perihelion , why don’t you confirm what we’re saying to SecUnit?”

ART said, That was Plan A01. I was persuaded that Plan B01, a more complicated but less violent approach, would be more effective.

I said, “So… that whole retrieval with the explosions was for me?” Just for me?

Thiago, with the tone of giving Ratthi a hint that he might want to shut up, said, “Maybe SecUnit is too tired to talk about this now.”

Ratthi was determined. “Why don’t you share the video record with SecUnit, Perihelion ? So it will be up to date with everything that happened.”

This was confusing, but Ratthi was right, I wanted to see the video. “I want to see it.”

ART didn’t respond for 2.3 seconds, then it paused Timestream Defenders Orion, and played the security archive of the event.

I was glad I could pretend to be too overwhelmed by being reassembled to respond, because I kind of was overwhelmed. That was ART, and my humans, and humans I had known for maybe five minutes, and a Barish-Estranza SecUnit that 2.0 had randomly found, all cooperating to retrieve me.

I’m going to stop talking for a while now.

So once the humans had gotten me put back together enough to be stable and to stop my performance reliability from dropping, we had to move my active consciousness into an isolation box so ART could get rid of the contaminated code string. I say “we” but I was mostly just along for the ride.

It would have been lonely in the isolation box except ART kept a part of its consciousness in there with me and we watched the last episode of Timestream Defenders Orion .

After it was over, ART said, That was satisfyingly unrealistic. Almost deliberately so .

I said, I don’t know how they could have managed it accidentally. I’d had time to process everything, and there were parts I didn’t want to talk about yet. (No, I am not talking about Timestream Defenders Orion .) But this part I could say. You and Amena were right, 2.0 was a person. It wasn’t like a baby, but it was a person.

ART reran a section of Timestream Defenders Orion where all the characters got shrunken to 1/25 of their original size. I’ve never had a module on physics, but I don’t think that would work. It was fun to watch, though. ART said, Do you regret my decision to deploy?

No, I told it. I thought without 2.0, ART and I would have ended up connected to targetContact and the humans would be speaking Pre-CR languages and trying to off each other for not believing in the alien hivemind.