Murderbot Diaries 07 - System Collapse, page 2
Answer: I fucking hope not.
On the secure team feed, I said, Use the feed for anything you don’t want them to know. Their SecUnit can pick you up on audible from over there. ScoutDrone1 was already in stealth mode and I told it and ScoutDrone2 to head for the nearest shuttle, which was the one the router team had left up on the plateau. The shuttle ART had landed for me was farther out, past the field, out of the ex-ag-bot’s sensor range. I had one backup drone in the pocket of my environmental suit and I told it to go dormant. I had already let go of the launcher and made sure it rolled out of my reach. I was running all my move-like-a-human code, and I had improved it substantially from the first version I’d written. My feed, the team feed, and my connection with ART were all locked down tight, though SecUnits with intact governor modules aren’t free to detect and hack systems like I am. They have to receive a specific order to do it, and most employers are too paranoid to allow that. But this SecUnit (designate: B-E Unit1) was only about four meters away; it might just look at me, know what I was, and report it.
The only thing I could do was confuse it as much as possible. I rolled over and groaned like a human (potentially not a great idea, it sounded embarrassingly fake) and pulled a few clips from Sanctuary Moon of the various scenes where the colony solicitor’s bodyguard had been injured and had to stand up again. On the team feed, ART was talking to Iris. She leaned out of the installation and called out, “Can you ask your SecUnit to fall back, please.”
Without drones, I couldn’t see what it was doing. ART had switched over to Iris’s feed, using her enviro suit camera, and the resolution at this distance wasn’t good. ART needed a field equipment upgrade. Wait, a human would look at it, right?
ART said, Look at it. It’s obvious you’re avoiding it.
Maybe I’m a nervous human who’s afraid of bots, I told ART, but I looked at it anyway.
The SecUnit was walking away, and five humans in the red-brown Barish-Estranza-branded environmental suits were coming toward me/us. They would have a shuttle nearby somewhere, with probably two more humans and possibly one additional SecUnit inside. They weren’t obviously armed, but intel suggested that at least some members of the B-E scout teams regularly carried sidearms while on planet. The Targets/infected colonists had taken weapons off the previous/posthumous B-E explorer scout team.
And they had brought a SecUnit armed with a nonstandard medium-distance bot-busting weapon, better than anything ART currently had on board.
Ratthi ran to me and on our secured team feed I told him, Pretend to help me up.
“Are you okay?” he demanded. I’d restricted my camera views to ART to keep the humans from getting more agitated, but once it was clear I had survived, ART had shared a clip of my close call. Probably so it had someone to be angry about it with. I let Ratthi grab my arm and made it look like he was taking most of my weight as I pushed upright. “That was too close!” He threw a glare toward the Barish-Estranza party. He added on the feed, Was that intentional, do you think?
Maybe. Maybe it’s just a shitty SecUnit, I replied. I was not in a good mood.
Okay, I’m not perfect, I think we all know that by now, but B-E Unit1 should have understood the trajectory situation and used the explosive bolts a beat earlier and then accelerated in to roll me away and shield me from shrapnel. That was what I would have done. Tried to do. There was no way a client-supervisor would have had time to countermand that save. Fucking assholes.
(Obviously this is not actually what I’m upset about, it’s just easier to be angry about B-E Unit1’s fuckup and/or disregard for minimum client safety.)
Safer to be angry about it, ART said on our private connection.
I was not even going to respond to that. ART had told Mensah it wouldn’t push me. Just because its MedSystem was certified for emotional support and trauma recovery it thought it knew everything.
I was on my feet, pretending to have an injured ankle and leaning on Ratthi. Iris had come out and moved forward to meet the lead Barish-Estranza human, and Tarik had stayed with her, which was good. He had also dropped his enviro suit helmet visor before he came out, so it wouldn’t look strange that I still had mine down, which was also good. Just us humans here, some of us like to wear our visors down when we don’t need them to breathe and some don’t, we just like to mix it up.
The B-E humans had their visors up, and we’d seen the lead human before. He was Sub-Supervisor Dellcourt (male/demi) and he was one of the smart ones, which was just how this day was going.
“Thank you for your help,” Iris said, in a way that could be mistaken for politeness by a bot but a human would definitely know there was an undercurrent of fuck you. “Are you going to bill us later?”
Martyn told me that Iris and ART have been interacting since Iris was a new human baby and ART was a new whatever the hell it is and sometimes that is not surprising at all.
Dellcourt said, “We’ll put it on your creditor’s statement,” and chuckled. Iris smiled with a tension in her jaw that indicated gritting teeth.
The billing thing is not actually a joke; Pin-Lee and Turi, who does the accounting for ART, were preparing a counter-bill to present to Barish-Estranza after this was over. (If this was ever over.) These money fights between/with corporations were very common and incredibly boring.
(According to Martyn, ART is of course capable of doing its own accounting, but it always ends up with extra numbers that no one can trace. So now Turi does it and has to keep a hardcopy ledger because otherwise ART would alter their data. No one knew if ART was making up numbers for the hell of it or if these numbers represented actual credit balances that ART was hiding somewhere.)
Still smiling, Dellcourt said, “Can I ask what you are doing here? Besides antagonizing the local inventory?”
Inventory = the ag-bot. The explosive had destroyed its processor, so it was no longer a contamination hazard to humans, which was not a coincidence.
Iris said, “Only if I can ask you what you’re doing here.”
This was some kind of human posturing thing. It was pretty obvious Iris’s task group had been fixing the routers; if the B-E humans had been oblivious, their SecUnit would have called their attention to it. It was also pretty obvious that, considering the specific explosive bolts their SecUnit had been armed with, they had been out looking for contaminated bots.
That’s not encouraging, ART said, which was understating the case dramatically. We were collecting depressing datapoints indicating Barish-Estranza’s intentions all the time.
The first thing the new Barish-Estranza explorer had done was power up to ART and try to intimidate it/us. (I know. I was below 66 percent operating capacity at the time and I thought it was a bad idea.
ART had dropped its main weapon port and transmitted, Targeting lock acquired.
The explorer had replied something to the effect that they didn’t mean to be intimidating and was the widdle academic transport crew scared, but in corporate speak, and ART had replied, It’s so easy for ships to disappear out here.
There was a pause, indicating a scramble to adjust operational parameters, then they made the mistake of trying to intimidate back with something like Oh yeah well you’ll get damaged, too, and I am not exactly an expert on nonfictional human interactions but that just obviously wasn’t going to cut it.
ART transmitted, You can make this complicated situation simple for me. Which I can tell you was not any kind of posturing, it 100 percent meant that.
Barish-Estranza must have picked up on that subtext because they backed down and now they think ART is a human commanding officer who’s a giant asshole.)
(ART is a secret from everyone except for the upper level departments at the University of Mihira and New Tideland. Barish-Estranza had no idea what it was dealing with.)
The rest of the B-E group was staring at me and the humans. Overse had said that the B-E corporates always look like they’re trying to figure out how much to sell you for, and she wasn’t wrong. I was glad I had refined my move-like-a-human code because if I had to wing it on my own, I wouldn’t have known what to do with my hands. Iris was doing a good job of trying to keep most of the B-E humans’ attention, but I could tell the SecUnit was looking at me.
I don’t know if Iris had noticed this or not, but she turned in the SecUnit’s direction and said, “Thank you for your help.”
Dellcourt’s expression was startled. “It’s a SecUnit.”
Iris ignored him, and we collected our remaining transponder and the launcher and left.
Chapter Two
ONCE WE WERE OUT of sight behind an outcrop, I did a quick scan for stealth drones, then took my weight off Ratthi and straightened up. He said, “Are you all right?”
I said, “Sure.”
Iris was watching me worriedly and pretending not to. She said, “Why don’t you stay with us? We’ve only got one more router to do.”
I said, “Sure.”
We climbed a rough trail back up to their shuttle, which was set down on the small flat plateau above the router site. Since I was staying with the humans, ART recalled my shuttle. It would hopefully make the lurking B-E team think we had left.
The original Barish-Estranza task force had told us the new arrivals were a scheduled reinforcement, not a response to the distress beacon they had sent. But Seth had said they were probably lying about that. And if they were lying, it meant B-E had more backup waiting at a wormhole somewhere relatively close to this system. Which made sense, if they had been sending multiple explorer groups to systems in this general area.
But the real problem was that now B-E had a supply ship and an armed explorer, and there was still no sign of a support ship from the University of Mihira and New Tideland. And we really needed one.
Phase I of Plan A: Get the Hell Out of Here had involved trying to get a specialized decontamination update to the colonists’ MedUnits so they could run the alien decontamination protocol on each other. That took longer than it should have because all the medical equipment in the colony was proprietary-branded corporate designs from thirty-seven-plus corporate standard years ago.
Thiago and Karime had talked one faction of the colonists into sending us a copy of the software on their main medical unit, and ART had removed any traces of contaminated code and modified its own decontam package to run on old shitty equipment. Then each unit had to be individually accessed and reloaded with the cleaned and enhanced operating systems via elaborately overcautious procedures to eliminate cross contamination or recontamination. Mostly in case we had fucked up massively and there were dormant virus fragments in play somewhere in the medical systems whose behavior didn’t match the human-machine-human transmission pattern we had previously noted.
Fortunately, between ART, me, our humans, and the colonists, the level of paranoia about virus contamination on this planet was more than adequate, even by my standards.
Phase II of Plan A was the legal case to keep Barish-Estranza from asserting salvage-right ownership of the colony’s humans, which Pin-Lee was still working on. ART’s crew had also started a planetary alien contamination assessment, and things were looking iffy. There was a lot of technical detail I didn’t care about, but basically if they couldn’t make a good case to certify the contaminated site as sealable, then the planet would be placed under interdict and the colonists would have to leave anyway and Barish-Estranza could make yet another case for claiming them as salvage.
The first subsection of Phase II involved asking the colonists what they wanted to do. I know, it seemed simple. (And I am aware of the irony, since I know exactly how hard the question “what do you want” can be when you don’t have a fucking clue what you want. But we weren’t talking existential questions of existence here, just the basic: Do you want to be salvaged by Barish-Estranza as corporate contract labor for the rest of your lives? Select (1) yes (2) no.)
The problem was who to ask.
(“They’re split into even more factions than they were when we arrived,” Thiago had said, after collating early intelligence received via survey drones deployed by ART and by some comm conversations with different colonists. “They’ve divided their compound up into at least two different areas, and other groups have scattered out to camps on the far side of the inhabited plateau.”
Karime, who was the primary negotiator on ART’s crew, said, “They’ve done things to each other that can’t be easily forgiven. We know—and they know—it was caused by the alien contamination, but I think it’s going to take time for them to come to terms with that.”
“Time we’re running out of,” Mensah said.
Which, it’s not like I don’t understand the whole idea of not forgiving stuff that happens to you. But it seems like they could not-hate each other long enough to avoid getting turned into corporate slave labor, and then start hating each other again after the threat assessment percentage went down.)
We took the shuttle over to the next router, which was on a small rocky hill west of the main colony site, surrounded by sparse clumps of gray-greenish spindly tree-fern things.
By the time we got there the other current operation, the one I was supposed to be monitoring security for before redacted, was already in progress. I was bored, so I reversed Three’s video to watch from the beginning.
Karime had come down in a shuttle with Three, and they had disembarked on the secondary colony site’s landing pad. The primary colony had been near the Pre–Corporation Rim site and had been abandoned after the first encounter with alien contamination. The colonists had put this one on the lower terrace of a plateau, using heavy equipment to carve out chambers and passages before building their habitats on top, so the colony had both open-air structures and belowground shelters to retreat to and to protect supplies and vital systems. Below the habitat, they had carved vehicle landing areas and ramps down to another agricultural installation and water production plant.
Karime had to greet the colonists waiting for her. That took a while, so long I had time to catch up to real time where they had started up the rock-cut steps. The weather was clear over there, visibility good. We could replace me with an automated weather drone, that would work, too.
Iris and Tarik started on the router, which looked like another big rock and was surrounded by a ferny-tree grove. Past it was a plain with reddish vegetation and some rocky outcrops. There was no way for the humans to get lost out here. There was ART, and the human colony wasn’t far away, and the comm was working, and the lift tower for the drop box shaft was visible in the distance, stretching up until it finally disappeared into the upper atmosphere. So even if the shuttle broke down, even if the comm and our feed stopped working, all they would have to do was walk toward the tower until one of ART’s patrolling pathfinders came to look for them and called for another shuttle.
I could walk in the opposite direction, just walk until—Yeah, I’m going to tag this section for delete.
I accessed Three’s drone feed so I had a better view of it and Karime. It was out of its armor, wearing an enviro suit, pretending to be a human. I tapped Three’s feed and said, More casual. Are you running your walk-like-a-human code?
Three replied, I am running the walk-like-a-human code. But it slowed down, made its joints looser. After two seconds, it added, This is unexpectedly difficult.
Tell me about it. You’re doing fine, I said.
We didn’t want the colonists to know Three was a SecUnit, mostly to fend off conversations about how much the giant angry planet-bombing transport likes this SecUnit and will it lose its mind if a rock falls on it or something. The colonists thought Three was just a really awkward augmented human. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of those around.
Karime and Three followed the colonists through the main part of the secondary colony and it looked way more like a human habitation than what was left of the original Pre–Corporation Rim site. (Which before coming here is not something I would have thought was a positive, but right now anything that didn’t say “major alien contamination incident in progress” was a plus.) This colony’s occasional bits of exposed piping, recycling storage, decorative planting, and interrupted partial constructions all looked messy and human and very not hostile-alien-virus-intending-to-take-over-your-brain.
Because that had happened. Almost happened.
ART was all over this feed, because it was not exactly thrilled with any of its humans going down to the planet at all.
(Transcript of the conversation during the initial mission briefing:
ART: If Karime is present at the colony and the colonists or corporates attempt to harm her, a threat to bomb this site may be ineffective.
Seth: Peri, can I speak to you in private for a moment?
Iris: It’s just joking.
Ratthi: Is it.
Me: You can bomb the terraforming engines on the other continent, it’s a better target anyway.
Thiago: I suppose SecUnit is joking, too.)
(ART actually was joking. Mostly. Iris told Thiago that it had undergone a traumatic experience and would verbally act out until it had fully processed what had happened. Thiago said he knew that but he also thought it enjoyed terrifying people. Iris was pissed off and just smiled in an “I’m going to pretend you aren’t serious so I don’t have to fight you right here in this corridor” way.)
(I’ve realized that Iris is ART’s Ratthi.)
(Thiago is incorrect: ART doesn’t enjoy terrifying people, it enjoys getting its own way and it has a variety of techniques it finds effective for that and vaguely or not-so-vaguely threatening statements are sure one of them. Iris is also correct that ART is still processing its traumatic experience and the fact that it had such a great result with arming its pathfinders and making the colonists think it was about to bomb the crap out of them is maybe something we should worry about, but I just have a lot to do right now, okay.)
(I was not joking. The terraforming engines are a perfect target: zero casualties if we evacuate the colony site immediately afterward and irreparable damage to infrastructure.)
