Марта Уэллс: Fugitive Telemetry

Tural asked, “Can I take the broken interface for analysis? The scene’s been scanned and position-mapped.”

Indah nodded. “Take it.”

Tural hesitated, glanced at me, but Indah told me, “That’s enough for now. We’ll call you if we need you.”

I know a “fuck off” when I hear one. So I fucked off.

MY FIRST JOB ASa consultant for Station Security had turned into a non-event, which was completely unsurprising. They really didn’t want me here and whatever Mensah said, they weren’t going to suddenly change their minds.

No access to private station systems was just the first restriction. The second was that I had to not conceal my identity. Not that I had been actively concealing it. Mensah’s staff, family, and the council had been told what I was; it was just the rest of the station who either hadn’t noticed me or thought I was Mensah’s security consultant. Station Security had wanted me to implement a public feed ID and they had wanted to put out a public safety warning notifying Station personnel and residents that there was a SecUnit running around loose. Mensah had refused to consider the public safety notice, but in one of the stupid meetings with Indah she had asked, “What exactly would this feed ID say?”

It gave me a 1.2 percent performance reliability drop. I tapped Pin-Lee’s feed and sent to her, Make a legal thing so I don’t have to do that .

She sent back, Mensah has to give them something, but she sent to Mensah, It doesn’t want the feed ID .

Humans and augmented humans can have null feed IDs. I knew from my shows that it meant different things depending on what polity, station, area, etc., they lived in. Here on Preservation it meant “please don’t interact with me.” It was perfect. And I’d already agreed not to hack their systems, what the fuck else could they want?

Senior Indah said, “The feed ID doesn’t need to say anything other than what everyone else’s says, just name, gender, and…” She trailed off. She was looking at me and I was looking at her.

Pin-Lee pointed out, “Everyone else who has a feed ID has one voluntarily. Consensually, one might say.”

Senior Indah stopped looking at me to glare at Pin-Lee. “All we’re asking for is a name.”

I have a name, but it’s private.

On their secure feed connection, Pin-Lee sent to Mensah, Oh, that’s going to go over well. When station residents are running into “Murderbot”—

That’s one of the reasons why it’s private.

Mensah said to Indah, “I’m not sure we can agree to that.”

“Frankly, I don’t understand the problem.” Indah made a helpless gesture toward me. “I don’t even know what it wants to be called.”

Senior Indah was acting like she didn’t think she had made an unreasonable request. But the reason she was making it was that she didn’t trust me and she wanted any humans or augmented humans who came into contact with me to be warned, in case I decided to go on a murder rampage. Because being warned by my feed ID would, somehow, mitigate being shot, or something.

Mensah pressed her lips together and looked at me. She sent, Can you explain to her why it’s a problem for you?

I’m not sure I could. And I got why from their perspective it seemed like such a small thing. Maybe it was worth it to get this meeting over with and not have to listen to humans talk about how they didn’t want me anywhere near their precious station.

For a name, I could use the local feed address that was hard coded into my neural interfaces. It wasn’t my real name, but it was what the systems I interfaced with called me. If I used it, the humans and augmented humans I encountered would think of me as a bot. Or I could use the name Rin. I liked it, and there were some humans outside the Corporation Rim who thought it was actually my name. I could use it, and the humans on the Station wouldn’t have to think about what I was, a construct made of cloned human tissue, augments, anxiety, depression, and unfocused rage, a killing machine for whichever humans rented me, until I made a mistake and got my brain destroyed by my governor module.

I posted a feed ID with the name SecUnit, gender = not applicable, and no other information.

Indah had blinked, then said, “Well, I suppose that will have to do.”

That was the end of the meeting. Pin-Lee and Mensah hadn’t talked about it, but Pin-Lee had stomped off to have intoxicants with some of her friend humans. And Mensah had called her marital partners Farai and Tano on the planet, and said she thought the future of humanity was pretty dismal, and they should take all the kids, siblings, their kids, and assorted relatives and move to a shack in the terraforming sector on the unsettled continent and start working in soil reclamation, whatever that was.

(I wouldn’t enjoy it, but I could work with it. It would be a lot easier to guard her from GrayCris there. But Farai and Tano hadn’t gone for the idea.)

Then two cycles later, someone had sent a photo of me to the Station newsstream identifying me as the rogue SecUnit mentioned in all those Corporation Rim newsfeed rumors.

There was little surveillance in the station but, at least before the agreement not to hack station systems, I had still been redacting myself from it. This photo had come from another source, maybe an augmented human’s feed camera. It had clearly been taken after I had completed my memory repair, after a public inquiry about GrayCris that had been held in the large Preservation Council meeting chamber. Mensah was walking down the steps away from the council offices and I was standing behind her between Pin-Lee and Dr. Bharadwaj. We were all looking to the side, with various what-the-fuck expressions. (One of the journalists had just asked the council spokesperson if GrayCris reps would be allowed at the meeting.) (It had been such a stupid question, I had forgotten not to have an expression.)

Supposedly it wasn’t Senior Indah or anyone else from Station Security who had sent the photo to the newsstream. Right, sure.

After that, Mensah, who was very angry but pretending not to be, gave me two boxes of intel drones, the tiny ones. (Indah had objected and Mensah had told her that it was a medical issue, that I needed them to fully interact with my environment and communicate.)

I think Mensah had already ordered the drones, as a sort-of bribe for me not continuing to point out that she hadn’t had any trauma treatment or retrieved client protocol after what had happened to her on TranRollinHyfa. Indah didn’t know that, right, so she thought Mensah getting the drones for me (giving intel drones to a rogue SecUnit nobody wanted around anyway) was Mensah’s way of telling her to fuck off.

She wasn’t wrong. Mensah’s really smart, she can sort-of bribe me and tell Indah to fuck off simultaneously.

I did have other things to do besides watch for GrayCris assassination agents and keep track of Station Security’s attempts to shove me out of the Preservation Alliance. Dr. Bharadwaj had started the preliminary research for her documentary on constructs, so I had been to her office five times to talk to her about it, and she wanted to set up a regular schedule of meetings with me.

(Dr. Bharadwaj was easy to talk to, for a human. On the first visit, after the photo of me was in the newsstream, we had talked about why humans and augmented humans are afraid of constructs, which I hadn’t meant to talk about and somehow ended up talking about anyway. She said she understood the fear because she had felt that way to a certain extent herself before I had stopped her from being eaten to death by a giant alien hostile. And she was trying to think how other humans could come to this understanding without the shared experience of almost being chewed up together in an alien fauna’s mouth. (Obviously she didn’t use those exact words but that’s what she meant.)