Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  But if we were wrong and removing the implant killed Eletra, at least this wouldn’t be my first accidental murder. Also, my hands don’t shake.

  Amena got another wound seal pack out and engaged the emergency kit’s sterile field. I followed its instructions to spray anesthetic prep fluid. Then with the occasional pop-up help hint from the kit’s feed, I used the scalpel to cut through the damaged tissue.

  I had a drone view of Amena watching the hand scanner, her brow furrowed in half-wince, half-concentration. I avoided the bits that would bleed a lot (not something a human trying to do this to their own body could have managed, so there, Amena) and the implant popped out.

  And Eletra woke up.

  She gasped a breath, her eyes open, staring without comprehension at Amena’s stomach. I stepped back and Amena hastily fit the pack over the wound before too much blood leaked out. It powered up and snugged in close to Eletra’s skin; her eyes fluttered closed again. From the report on the emergency kit’s feed, the pack had delivered a hefty punch of painkillers and antibiotics. I put the implant in the little container the emergency kit offered, and the kit dutifully sprayed it with something. (I hope the kit knew what it was doing, because I sure didn’t.)

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, we’re helping you,” Amena was telling Eletra, patting her hand.

  Ras’s body was there in the middle of everything and that just felt wrong. I picked it up and carried it to a gurney on the far side of the room. In a supply cabinet I found a cover to put over him, but before I did I pulled down his jacket and shirt to look at his implant. It was on his shoulder blade, surrounded by damaged tissue, much thicker and more swollen than Eletra’s. I wondered if he had known it was there, at some point. If he had jabbed at his back with something trying to get it out, before the Targets made him forget about it again. (It was still a stupid thing to do, but I understood the impulse. I understood it a lot.)

  Then the emergency kit blared an alarm through our feed as Eletra’s pulse and respiration rate dropped.

  The kit flashed a handy annotated diagram of what we should do into the feed. Amena swore a lot and helped me roll Eletra over. I started chest compressions, being extremely careful with the amount of pressure I was exerting. Amena frantically grabbed for the resuscitation devices. The kit was trying to be helpful but it was nothing like a MedSystem sliding into my feed with everything I needed to know right there. It was urging me to start rescue breathing, but I couldn’t. My lungs work in a completely different way than human lungs do. It’s not only that I need much less air but the connections are all different. Aside from the utterly disgusting thought of putting my mouth which I talk with on a human (ugh), I didn’t think I could expel enough air for what the kit wanted me to do.

  Amena ran over and started the rescue breathing herself, but it wasn’t working.

  I told her, “We need the mask.”

  Amena gave up with a gasp of frustration and went back to the kit. She found the mask and wrestled with its sterile packaging, trying to rip the plastic with her teeth, and I couldn’t stop compressions to help her. (Yes, I did just realize we should have thought of this possibility earlier. They never showed humans getting the tools ready on MedCenter Argala, it was all just there.)

  Then from across the compartment, the MedSystem made a soft clunk and its platform lights turned violet. It had just powered on. Amena stopped, the mask in her hand finally. She spat out a piece of plastic wrapper and demanded, “Did you get it turned on?”

  “No.” That was ART’s MedSystem, but without ART. Its reactivated feed said it was operating at factory standard.

  It could be one more weird anomaly in this unending cycle of what the fuck. Or it could be a trick, TargetControlSystem trying to get us to put Eletra in there so it could kill her. Except that Eletra was dying anyway so why bother?

  And I tried not to see this as some remnant of ART still in the ship acting to save a human.

  Well, fuck it. I stopped compressions, scooped up Eletra, and carried her to the MedSystem’s platform.

  I set her down and the surgical suite dropped over her immediately, a pad settling over her chest to restart her heartbeat and a much more complicated mask apparatus lowering to work on her respiration. In six seconds it had her breathing on her own and her heartbeat stabilized. The platform contoured to roll her onto her side. Delicate feelers peeled away the wound pack and tossed it onto the deck, then started to knit the raw bleeding spot in her back.

  On the gurney, the emergency kit beeped once in protest, then shut up.

  Amena let out a long breath of relief, then wiped her face on her sleeve. She started to gather the scattered pieces of the kit’s resuscitation gear. Trying to fit them back into their containers, she said, “So what turned the MedSystem on—”

  I said, “I know as much as you do about what is happening on this ship.” Which was why I put the unknown corporate human who was dying anyway in the possibly compromised MedSystem and not, say, Amena or myself.

  I didn’t like that Eletra had nearly died, despite the fact that we had followed all the instructions carefully. I didn’t like that Ras had died before we could do anything. I especially didn’t like that the Targets had killed him. He wasn’t my human but he had popped off right in front of me and I hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

  They’re so fucking fragile.

  Amena glared, then eyed me speculatively. “Are you sure you’re not hurt? You did get shot in the head, again. And didn’t that gray person shoot you before you tore their lungs out?”

  I hadn’t felt any lungs while I was rummaging around in Target Two’s chest cavity, but I’m sure they were in there somewhere. “It was just an energy weapon.”

  “It was just an energy weapon,” Amena muttered to herself, in a very bad imitation of my voice, while determinedly trying to fit the mask attachment with the oxygen nodules into the wrong slot. “If you weren’t so angry at me, you’d realize I was right.”

  For fuck’s sake. “I am not angry at you.”

  Okay, that’s a lie, I was angry at her, or really annoyed at her, and I had no idea why. It wasn’t her fault she was here, we were here, she hadn’t done anything but be human and she wasn’t even whiny. And her first reaction to another human shooting me had been to jump on his back and try to choke him.

  Amena gave up on the mask and gave me her full attention. “You look angry.”

  “That’s just something my face does sometimes.” This is why helmets with opaque face plates are a good idea.

  Amena snorted in disbelief. “Yes, when you’re angry.” She hesitated, and I couldn’t interpret her expression, except that it wasn’t annoyed anymore. “I should have said more, when they were talking about you. It was just like my history and political consciousness class. I didn’t think the instructors were making things up, but … it was just like the examples they used.”

  They had been talking about me as a SecUnit the way humans always talked about SecUnits, and it had been pretty mild, compared to a lot of things I had heard humans say. If I got angry every time that happened … I don’t know, but it sounded exhausting. Talking about this was exhausting. “I’m not angry about that.”

  Amena demanded, “If you’re not angry, then what’s wrong?”

  I was definitely glaring now. “How do you want the list sorted? By time stamp or degree of survivability?”

  Amena said in exasperation, “I mean what’s wrong with you!”

  There’s that question again, but I assumed she didn’t want to discuss the existential quandary posed by my entire existence. “I got hit on the head by an unidentified drone and shot, you were there!”

  “Not that! Why are you sad and upset?” That was the point where even I could tell that Amena was terrified as well as furious. “There’s something you’re not telling me and it’s scaring me! I’m not a fucking hero like my second mom or a genius like everybody else in my family, I’m just ordinary, and you’re
all I’ve got!”

  I wasn’t expecting that. It was so far from what I thought she had meant, and she was so upset, that the truth inadvertently came out. “My friend is dead!”

  Amena was startled. Staring blankly at me, she asked, “What friend? Somebody on the survey?”

  I couldn’t stop now. “No, this transport. This bot pilot. It was my friend, and it’s dead. I think it’s dead. I don’t see how it would have let this happen if it wasn’t dead.” Wow, that did not sound rational.

  Amena’s expression did something complicated. She took a step toward me. I backed up a step. She stopped, held up her hands palm-out, and said in a softer voice, “Hey, I think you need to sit down.”

  Now she was talking to me like I was a hysterical human. Worse, I was acting like a hysterical human. “I don’t have time to sit down.” When I was owned by the company, I wasn’t allowed to sit down. Now humans keep wanting me to sit down. “I have a lot of code to write so I can hack the targetControlSystem.”

  Amena started to reach out for me and then pulled her hand back when I stepped away again. “But I think you’re emotionally compromised right now.”

  That was … that was so completely not true. Stupid humans. Sure, I’d had an emotional breakdown with the whole evisceration thing, but I was fine now, despite the drop in performance reliability. Absolutely fine. And I had to kill the rest of the Targets in the extremely painful ways I’d been visualizing. I needed to check Scout One’s data to see if I could tell where we were going in the wormhole and how long it would take us to get there. And it occurred to me there might not be a destination, if whatever was controlling ART’s functions knew I’d killed three Targets and had decided to revenge them by trapping us in the wormhole forever. I said, “I am not. You’re emotionally compromised.”

  (I know, but at the time it seemed like a relevant comeback.)

  Amena, like a rational person, ignored it. She said persuasively, “Won’t it be easier to write code if you sit down?”

  I still wanted to argue. But maybe I did want to sit down.

  I sat down on the floor and cautiously tuned up my pain sensors. Oh yeah, that hurt.

  Amena knelt down in front of me, angling her head so she could see my face. This did not help. She said, “I know you don’t eat, but is there anything I can get you, like something from the kit or a blanket…”

  I covered my face. “No.”

  Right, so say, just theoretically, I was emotionally compromised. A recharge cycle which I actually didn’t need right now wasn’t going to help with that. So what would help with that?

  Taking over targetControlSystem and hurting it very, very badly, that’s what would help with that.

  My drone view showed Amena getting up and pacing slowly across the room, her shoulders drooping. Then on the platform, Eletra stirred and made bleary noises. Amena hurried over to her, saying, “Hey, it’s all right. You’re okay.”

  Eletra blinked and peered up at her. She managed to say, “What happened? Is Ras all right?”

  Amena leaned against the platform, and from the high angle she looked older, with lines on either side of her mouth. Keeping her voice low, she said, “I’m sorry, he died. You had these strange implants in your back, that were hurting you, and his killed him. We had to take yours out and it almost killed you. Did you know they were there?”

  Eletra looked baffled. “What? No, that’s … I don’t understand…”

  I checked my penetration testing, but there were no results. That was annoying. If a system won’t communicate with me, I can’t get inside it. And apparently targetControlSystem was operating as a single system. Stations and installations use multiple systems that work with each other as a safety feature. (Safety is relative.) I usually went in through a security system function and used it to get to all the others. (Technically, I am a security system, so it was easy to get other security systems to interact with me, or to confuse them into thinking I was already part of them.)

  There are still ways to get into heavily shielded systems, or systems with unreadable code, or unfamiliar architecture. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I needed to use the most reliable method: get a dumb human user to access the system for me.

  Ras’s implant had ceased functioning, probably having destroyed its own power source to kill him. Eletra’s implant was still in the emergency kit’s little container, where it thought anomalous things removed from humans needed to be stored. It was now covered with a sterile goo but was still capable of receiving. I dropped my jamming signal.

  Via Scout Two in the control area foyer, Target Four had set the screen device aside on a bench. All the Targets were talking, ignoring the control area hatch. They looked agitated and angry. They might have figured out that we weren’t locked in the control area, finally. I was glad I hadn’t had the chance to kill all of them, since there was a possibility now that they might actually come in handy.

  (I had no idea where the targetDrones were, but logic and threat assessment said they should be congregated up against the hatchways sealing off my safe zone. That was going to be a problem.)

  I checked on Scout One’s progress, searching through the images of the floating display surfaces it had captured. Lots of shifting diagrams and numbers that might as well have been abstract art as far as I was concerned. These screens were meant to be interpreted through ART’s feed, and without it to explain and annotate the data, it was all a mess. Couldn’t anything be simple, just for once? I can fly low atmosphere craft but nobody ever thought it was remotely rational to give murderbots the modules on piloting transports. Wait, okay, there was a display with a schematic of ART’s hull, with a lot of moving wavy patterns around it that probably would make sense if I knew anything about what happens in wormholes. There was a time counter on it, but nothing indicated what it was timing. So, not helpful.

  What would have been helpful was an episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Or World Hoppers. Or anything. (Anything except MedCenter Argala.) But media would calm me down, and I wanted to stay angry.

  I couldn’t sit here and wait, there had to be something else I could do. I stood up.

  “Oh, you’re up.” Amena was sitting on the edge of the platform next to a half-conscious Eletra so she could hold her hand. She eyed me dubiously. “Already. I thought you were going to rest.”

  “Do these make any sense to you?” I sent her the display images from ART’s bridge.

  Amena blinked rapidly. “They’re navigation and power information, like from a pilot’s station.” She took in my expression and waved a hand in exasperation. “Well, if you knew that, why didn’t you say so?”

  Fine, that one was on me. “They’re from my drone sealed in the control area. Do you know how to read them?”

  Amena squinted at nothing again, but slowly shook her head and groaned under her breath. She glanced down at Eletra, who was unconscious again, and carefully untangled their hands. “From what she said, I doubt she was on the bridge crew.” Then she lifted her brows. “Do you know if there’s an aux station in engineering?”

  I didn’t know that. “An aux station?”

  “It’s like an extra monitoring station for the engineering crew. You can’t take control of the bridge unless the command pilot transfers the helm—at least you couldn’t in the ones I’ve seen—but you can get displays for the rest of the ship’s systems. We have them on some of our ships but I don’t know how common they are.” She admitted, “We might have them because our ships are an older design.”

  It wasn’t the kind of thing that would be needed on a bot-piloted transport, but it couldn’t hurt to check.

  My performance reliability had leveled out at 89 percent. Not great, but I could work with it. I still hadn’t identified the source of the drop. I’d taken multiple projectile hits without having that kind of steady drop. I took Ras’s energy weapon out of my jacket pocket and set it on the bench. “Keep this just in case. It’s not going to work on the targ
etDrones but it should work on the Targets.” I hate giving weapons to humans but I couldn’t leave her without something. “I’ll go to engineering.”

  “Hold it, wait.” Amena hopped off the platform. “I want to go with you.”

  I had a confusing series of reactions to this. Not in order: (1) Exasperation, at her, at myself. (2) Habitual suspicion. On my contracts for the company, the clingy clients were the ones most likely to (a) get me shot (b) advocate loudly for abandoning the damaged SecUnit because it would take too long to load me in the transport. (And humans wonder why I have trust issues.) (3) Overwhelming urge to kill anything that even thought about threatening her. “Someone has to stay here with the injured human.”

  She grimaced. “Right, sorry.” Then she looked away and rubbed her eyes.

  And I’d made her cry. Good job, Murderbot.

  I knew I’d been an asshole and I owed Amena an apology. I’d attribute it to the performance reliability drop, and the emotional breakdown which I am provisionally conceding as ongoing rather than an isolated event that I am totally over now, and being involuntarily shutdown and restarted, but I can also be kind of an asshole. (“Kind of” = in the 70 percent–80 percent range.) I didn’t know what to say but I didn’t have time to do a search for relevant apology examples. (And it’s not like I ever find any relevant examples that I actually want to use.) I said, “I’m sorry for … being an asshole.”

  That made Amena make a noise like she was trying to express her sinuses and then she covered her face. “No. I mean, it’s all right. I haven’t exactly been nice to you, so we’re probably even.”

  I’m going now, right now. Right now.

  I was at the hatch when she said, “Just don’t stop talking to me on the feed.”

  I said, “I won’t.”

  HelpMe.file Excerpt 2

  (Section from interview Bharadwaj-09257394.)

  “I noticed a thing about your transcript.”