Марта Уэллс: Fugitive Telemetry

The second time we had talked I had somehow just come out and told her that I thought being here on Preservation Station as myself, and not pretending to be an augmented human or a robot, was disturbing and complicated and I didn’t know if I could keep doing it. She had said that it would be strange if I didn’t find it disturbing and complicated, because my whole situation was objectively disturbing and complicated. For some reason that made me feel better.)

I had also been helping Ratthi with the data analysis for his survey reports, and he was trying to convince me that could be a job I could do for other researchers. Which, sure, I mean, it could. If I wanted to be almost as bored as when a lot of my job had been standing in one place unable to move and staring at a wall. It wasn’t boring with Ratthi, but not all researchers were going to be so happy about the reports we constructed, or get me to go with them to live performances in the Station’s theater.

But whatever, now I just needed intel for threat assessment so I could figure out if GrayCris had killed the dead human or not and go back to my happy boring life on Preservation Fucking Station.

I knew from my drones that Mensah was back in the council offices (I had a routine in place to check my various task groups of drone sentries every seventeen seconds). If the station had better surveillance, or if I had access to what little surveillance was installed in the transit ring, I could start an image search for the dead human, get a timestamp of when they arrived, and match it to the Port Authority’s record of entry. Probably before Station Security managed to get the body scan from Medical.

It did seem unlikely that the dead human had been a GrayCris agent, because somebody had killed him. As far as I knew, I was the only one currently on the station looking for GrayCris agents to kill.

I just realized I don’t like the phrase “as far as I knew” because it implies how much you actually don’t know. I’m not going to stop using it, but. I don’t like it as much anymore.

And speaking of not knowing things, I couldn’t be sure the dead human wasn’t tangentially involved in a GrayCris operation. He could have been sent by a rival corporate, even by the company, to shadow GrayCris activity, and been killed by an actual GrayCris operative.

Right, so while the corporate-operative-killed-by-GrayCris-agent thing was a scenario that made sense, there was zero data to indicate that it was actually connected in any way to reality. But the fact was, looking for anomalous activity is how you detect security breaches. A murder in a very non-murdery station like Preservation was definitely anomalous.

Unless the dead human had been here to visit other humans, they would have needed a place to sleep and put their stuff. Humans need stuff, I had never seen one travel without at least something.

Near the port was a large housing block for short-term residents, transients who were usually waiting for something: for a transport to arrive, for permission to continue to the planet or another in-system destination, for approval to become a longterm resident, other reasons.

Preservation Station didn’t get nearly as many transients as the major hubs I’d passed through in the Corporation Rim. Most humans who came here were going to one of the planets in the Preservation Alliance for a long stay, either permanently or for a term of work. The others were from outside the Rim, using Preservation as a waystation heading somewhere else, or they were traders or independent merchants with cargo transports. Occasionally there were humans from sites that were not part of the transit network, “lost” colonies, independents who had not maintained contact with transit stations, “lost” stations, whatever. There were no Corporation Rim corporations here, so no reason for corporates to come on business. Some came as visitors sometimes, but most were afraid to travel outside the Rim. (They thought everywhere outside the Rim was all raiders killing everybody and cannibalism.)

There were places to stay other than the housing block, like the hotel for longterm residents where Ratthi and the others who didn’t have permanent quarters on the station had rooms. Where I sort-of lived now. Again, surveillance was stupidly minimal and without access to their systems… permission to access their systems.

But there was another way to get the data I needed.

I went to the transient housing block first because it was statistically more likely, if the initial theory was correct and the dead human had been a recent visitor.

I stopped outside the entrance, near a seating area with chairs and tables, surrounded by large round plant biomes that were partly decorative and partly an information exhibit about what not to touch if you went to the planet’s surface. (Yeah, good luck with that. Trying to get humans not to touch dangerous things was a full-time job.) I stood in a spot where I could pretend to be reading the hostel’s feed instructions and sent a ping.

After 1.2 seconds (I’m guessing the pause was due to astonishment) I got an answer, and I went through the entrance into the lobby.

It was a round high-ceilinged space, with registration kiosks, lots of corridors leading off toward the room sections, and an archway into another room with shelves and cold cases where food products were stored for the humans staying in the hostel. (Or really, for any humans or augmented humans who wandered by. The Preservation Alliance has a weird thing about food and medical care and other things humans need to survive being free and available anywhere.) The bot was in there, restocking items from a floating cart.

It was sort of humanform, but more functional, with six arms and a flat disk for a “head” that it could rotate and extend for scanning. It had rotated it to “watch” me walk through the lobby, a behavior designed to make humans comfortable (its actual eyes were sensors that were all over its body.) (I don’t know why bot behaviors that are useless except to comfort humans annoy me so much.) (Okay, maybe I do. They built us, right? So didn’t they know how this type of bot took in visual data? It’s not like sensors and scanners just popped up randomly on its body without humans putting them there.)

This is one of the Preservation “free bots” you hear so much about. They have “guardians” (owners) who are responsible for them, but they get to pick their own jobs. (Are there any who don’t have jobs and just sit around watching media? I don’t know. I could have asked, but the whole thing was so boring it might send me into an involuntary shutdown.)

It said, “Hello, SecUnit. What brings you here?”

Yeah, whatever. I said, “You don’t have to pretend I’m a human.”

The data in the ping had told me that this bot had different protocols from the ones in the Corporation Rim, probably because it had been constructed somewhere else. I identified its language module, pulled it out of archive storage, loaded it, and established a feed connection. I sent it a salutation and it sent back, query?

It was asking me why I was here. I replied query: identify, and attached an image of the dead human.

A non-dead human walked into the lobby, one of the hostel supervisors. He stopped, stared at us, and said, “Is everything all right, Tellus?”

(The bot’s name is Tellus. They name themselves and hearing about it is exhausting.)

Tellus replied, “We are speaking.”

The supervisor frowned. “Do you need any help?”

Since the bot was still unloading the cart with three of its arms, obviously he was talking about me. The bot said, “No help needed.”

The supervisor hesitated, nodded, and then continued on down a corridor. I don’t know what they think I’m going to do to their bots. Teach them to hack? Bots don’t have governor modules like constructs and it’s not like the Preservation bots weren’t supposedly able to do whatever they wanted.