Марта Уэллс: Rogue Protocol

(Note to self: look up definition of metaphor.)

I had asked Ayres if the twenty years was measured by the planetary calendar or the proprietary calendar of the corporation who maintained the planet, or the Corporation Rim Recommended Standard, or what? He didn’t know, and hadn’t understood why it mattered.

Yeah, that was why I was trying not to get attached to any of them.

I would never have picked this transport if I had a choice, but it had been the only one going to the transit station that was the connection to my next destination. I was trying to get to a place called Milu, outside the Corporation Rim.

I had made the decision after I left RaviHyral. At first, I had needed to move fast and put as much distance between myself and its transit station as possible. (See above, murdered humans.) I’d grabbed the first friendly cargo transport and after a seven-cycle trip I disembarked on a crowded transit hub, which was good, because crowds were easy to get lost in, and bad, because there were humans and augmented humans everywhere, all around me, looking at me, which was hell. (After meeting Ayres and the others, obviously my definition of hell changed.)

Also, I missed ART, and I even missed Tapan, and Maro and Rami. If you had to take care of humans, it was better to take care of small soft ones who were nice to you and thought you were great because you kept preventing them from being murdered. (They had only liked me because they thought I was an augmented human, but you can’t have everything.)

After RaviHyral, I’d decided to stop screwing around and get out of the Corporation Rim, but I still had to plan my route. The schedules and feeds I needed hadn’t been accessible on the transport, but now that we’d docked I was inundated with info, so I had to take some time to go through it all. Plus I had been at this hub for twenty-two minutes and I already desperately needed some quiet time. So I ducked into an automated transient service center and used some of the funds on my new hard currency card to pay for a private rest cubicle. It was just big enough to lay down in with my knapsack, but it was enough like a transport box to be vaguely comforting. I had spent a lot of great alone time in transport boxes, being shipped as freight to contracts. I thought a human had to be pretty tired to rest in here without screaming.

Once I was settled, I checked the station feeds for recently arrived newsbursts about DeltFall and GrayCris. I hit a story thread almost immediately. Lawsuits were underway, depositions in progress, and so on. It didn’t look like there had been much change since I left RaviHyral, which was frustrating. That pesky SecUnit nobody wanted to talk about was still unaccounted for, so yay for that. It was hard to tell if the journalists thought somebody was hiding me or not. They didn’t seem to want to speculate that I’d wandered off on my own. Then I hit an interview with Dr. Mensah, posted six cycles ago.

It was unexpectedly good to see her again. I increased magnification for a better look and decided she seemed tired. I couldn’t tell where she was from the video background and a quick scan of the interview content didn’t mention it. I hoped she was back on Preservation; if she was still on Port FreeCommerce I hoped they had contracted decent security. But knowing how she felt about SecUnits (the whole “it’s slavery” thing) I doubted she had. Even without a MedSystem on my feed, I could tell there were changes in the skin around her eyes that indicated a lack of sleep verging on chronic.

I felt a little guilty, sort of, almost. Something was wrong, and I hoped it wasn’t about me. It wasn’t her fault I’d escaped, and I hoped they weren’t trying to hold her responsible for, you know, releasing a rogue SecUnit with a record of past mass murder onto an unsuspecting population. Granted, that hadn’t been her intention. She had meant to ship me home to Preservation, where she would have, I don’t know, civilized me, or educated me, or something. I was vague on the details. The only thing I knew for certain was that Preservation didn’t need SecUnits, and their idea of a SecUnit being considered a free agent meant I’d have a human “guardian.” (In other places they just call that your owner.)

I reviewed the content again. The investigation of GrayCris being conducted by the news agencies was turning up other incidents that suggested the attack on DeltFall was more business as usual for them than an aberration. (This is my surprised face.) GrayCris had been collecting complaints for a long time about sketchy contracts and exclusive-use deals on various sites, including a potential terraforming project outside the Corporation Rim that had been abandoned, though nobody knew why. Fucking up a planet, even part of a planet, for no reason was kind of a big deal, and I was surprised they had gotten away with it. Okay, no, I wasn’t surprised.

The journalist asked Dr. Mensah about that last one, and she said, “After what I saw of GrayCris, I intend to urge the Preservation Council to join the formal call to investigate the situation at Milu. A failed terraforming attempt is a tragic waste of both resources and the natural surface of a planet, but GrayCris has refused to explain their actions.”

The journalist had tagged an infobar to Mensah’s statement, with some commentary about a small company from outside the Corporation Rim which had recently filed to take possession of GrayCris’ abandoned terraform project. They had just set up an automated tractor array to prevent the derelict terraform facility from breaking up in the atmosphere, and were supposed to start assessments soon. The commentary got all dramatic then, wondering what the assessment team would find.

I laid there, flicking through feeds and schedules, and decided I thought I knew what the assessment team would find.

The reason I was wandering free and Dr. Mensah was on the news was because GrayCris had been willing to kill a whole bunch of helpless human researchers for exclusive access to alien remnants, the mineral and possibly biological remains of a sentient alien civilization left in the soil of our survey area. I knew a lot more about it now, after listening to Tapan and the others talk about their code for identifying strange synthetics, and because I’d downloaded a book on it and read it between episodes of my shows. There were tons of agreements between political and corporate entities, inside and outside the Corporation Rim, dealing with alien remnants. Basically you weren’t supposed to touch them without a lot of special certifications and maybe not even then.

When I had left Port FreeCommerce, the assumption was that GrayCris had wanted unimpeded access to those remnants. Presumably, GrayCris would have set up a mining operation or colony build or some other kind of massive project as cover while they recovered and studied the remnants.

So what if the terraform facility at Milu was just a successful cover for a mining or recovery operation for alien remnants or strange synthetics or both? GrayCris had finished the recovery and pretended to abandon the terraform that had never actually been in progress. With the facility derelict, it would eventually break up in the atmosphere, taking all the evidence with it.

If Dr. Mensah had proof of that, the investigation against GrayCris would get a lot more interesting. Maybe so interesting that the journalists would forget all about that stray SecUnit. And then Dr. Mensah wouldn’t be needed on Port FreeCommerce and she could go back to Preservation where it was safe and I could stop worrying about her.

Getting proof wouldn’t be hard, I thought. Humans always think they’ve covered their tracks and deleted their data, but they’re wrong a lot. So… maybe I should do that. I could go to Milu and take whatever data I collected and send it to Dr. Mensah, either to wherever she was staying at Port FreeCommerce or to her home on Preservation.