Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  “Was the font wrong?”

  “No, the font was lovely. But whenever the company is mentioned you edit out the company and change it to the company.” Checks session recording. “In fact, you’ve just done it now.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.” pause “Is it the logos? You’ve mentioned them before. I did think at the time, that you wouldn’t have known they were impossible to remove if you hadn’t already tried.”

  “That’s one of the reasons.”

  “We’ve talked a little about trauma recovery treatments. I wonder if you’ve ever thought about taking one yourself.”

  :session redacted:

  7

  I gave Amena a view of what I was doing via my main video input, so she would know I was still there and I didn’t have to think what to say to her.

  (Also, if there was an engineering aux station and it showed we were trapped forever, then she could see it for herself and I wouldn’t have to tell her.)

  As I went down the corridor, Amena said, Why is the vid so jumpy? Is it from a drone?

  It’s from my eyes.

  Oh. I’d left the task group of eight drones with her, and I could see her via their cameras. She sat on the platform next to Eletra, elbow propped on her knee. This is creepy, she said. I was passing a lounge attached to the galley, with blue padded couches along the walls. Three cups with ART’s university logo sat on a low table, and a gray jacket, one of the kinds humans wore for exercise, was draped over the back of a chair. The way everything looks so normal. Like somebody could walk in any second.

  She wasn’t wrong. Except for those few cabins in the living quarters, I hadn’t seen any areas that were trashed, or where it looked like a struggle had occurred. Is there anything about this situation that isn’t creepy?

  Hah, she replied. If I think of something I’ll mention it.

  I reached the sealed hatch that accessed the passage to the engineering module, then had to work on the panel to bypass the damage I’d done to delay anyone opening it from the other side. Breaking the safe zone I’d established might not be a great idea, but my sentry drones on the other two sealed hatches had registered no activity, so as a calculated risk it wasn’t nearly as dumb as some other things I could think of. And the Targets in the control area foyer still hadn’t picked up the screen device, and I couldn’t sit around and wait for them to get off their asses.

  Right, I could, but I wasn’t going to.

  Amena said, Everybody in the survey team must be really worried about us. I’m glad … I mean, I’m not glad you got caught, too, but if I was here alone … It would have been really bad. My uncle Thiago is probably relieved that at least you’re with me.

  The hatch opened onto an empty corridor, no targetDrones. I sealed it again and left a sentry drone on this side to alert me if anything tampered with it. Then I sent the rest of my cloud ahead down the corridor. I knew Amena was trying to compliment me. But it was strange that her view of Thiago’s opinion of me was so different from the objective reality. Your uncle Thiago doesn’t trust me. Not that I was upset about that or cared about it at all.

  She made a snorting noise that came through the feed and my drone audio. Sure he does. You saved him from those people who attacked the facility.

  That was beside the point. I’d saved a lot of humans and the number who had trusted and/or noticed me as anything other than an appliance attached to HubSystem afterward was statistically insignificant. He didn’t like the way I did it.

  She sighed and rubbed at a dark stain on her shoe. He’s still getting over what happened with second mom getting abducted after her survey. Things like that don’t happen on Preservation. It was a big shock. And … maybe he’s a little jealous. She can talk to you about what happened to her, but she can’t talk to us.

  Mensah had said that, too. I didn’t understand why they wanted her to talk about it. Couldn’t they just read the report? That’s not what we talk about. Most of the time.

  Amena hesitated. They wouldn’t really have killed her. They couldn’t get away with that.

  That sounds incredibly naive, but Amena and Thiago and the rest of Mensah’s family and 99 plus percent of Preservation’s population still didn’t know about the other assassination attempt. If GrayCris had managed to cut a deal with the company, they would have. They would have taken the ransom from Preservation and killed her, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin, and no one would have been able to do anything about it.

  My scout drones encountered a closed safety hatch into the main engineering module section. This was a good sign: if the targetDrones had been circulating through here, it would have been open. I reached it and hit the manual release. As soon as the hatch started to slide upward I sent my drone cloud under the gap, directing it to spread out into the corridor ahead. No lost contacts, and their cameras and scans detected no movement. So far so good, though I was picking up a vibration just on the edge of my perceptible range. Maybe it was normal? I hadn’t spent any time here when I’d traveled with ART before.

  My drone cloud didn’t encounter any targetDrones as it followed the circular corridor around to the engine control access, which was a relief. The last thing I needed was to be whacked into an involuntary restart again. Figuring out a countermeasure for the stealth material on the targetDrones and on the Targets’ helmets was on the long list of stuff I needed to do so we could survive. But none of the things on the list would matter much if the targetControlSystem had sent us into the wormhole with no destination.

  I’d seen shows about humans and augmented humans trapped in wormholes indefinitely. They ranged from bleakly depressing (due to an excess of realism) to highly unlikely (due to an excess of optimism). At least the humans in the shows knew they were on a potentially endless trip, and not just a long one.

  I hadn’t seen any sign of damage or disturbance up to this point, but then I came around the curve into a foyer where quiescent display surfaces floated along the walls above specialized control interfaces. The weird thing was that the stations were active, though in standby mode, and not shut down. Even I knew you didn’t mess with the engines while they were actually making the transport go. These stations would be for fine-tuning or altering or something, which should only be done while the transport was in dock.

  Also, one station chair was twisted around to face the entrance, and near it one of ART’s repair drones lay smashed on the deck. My drones are tiny intel drones, but most of ART’s were larger, with multiple arms and physical interfaces so they could perform maintenance and other specialized tasks. This drone had six of its spidery arms deployed when something had knocked it out of the air, and it was splayed and flattened to the deck like something had stepped on it.

  I wanted to pick it up and have an emotion over it like a stupid human. But I smelled growth medium again.

  Amena said, This is such a different set-up from the ships I’ve seen. Can you look for a display somewhere with—

  Oh, I had a bad feeling about this. I followed the smell. It led me through the next hatch and down a short gravity well where blinking caution markers floated in the air. (The gist was that various component manufactories and shipwrights and the University of Mihira and New Tideland did not want you to come down here without a Class Master Engineering License or Local Jurisdictional Equivalent and if you felt you just had to then really don’t fucking touch anything.) Amena had stopped talking, and her assigned drone camera showed her squinting in concentration as she watched the scene through my eyes.

  At the bottom of the gravity well, there was a platform where I could look down through the transparent shielding bubble over the engines.

  Confession: I didn’t know what the engines were supposed to look like, exactly. I’d never had to guard a transport’s engines and they were usually too boring to show on the entertainment media. But I knew whatever was down there wasn’t supposed to have a large organ
ic mass on top of it that smelled of algae and growth medium.

  Amena said softly, What … What the … What is that?

  Believe me, it was the question occupying 92 percent of my attention right now.

  Organic neural tissue can be melded with inorganic systems (Example A: the squishy bits inside my skull) so there was an outside chance (it was so outside I couldn’t estimate a percentage) that this organic mass was a normal part of ART’s systems, maybe something unique and proprietary.

  But then why did it smell like the Targets?

  I got an alert from Scout Two in the control area foyer. I checked its input and saw Target Five stride over and pick up the screen device where it lay on a chair. (Why the hell does everything have to happen at once? But at least the freaky thing on ART’s engines wasn’t trying to crawl up here and kill us yet.) As Target Five tapped his fingers on the solid-state screen, I widened my input range to pick up any active channel. In 2.3 seconds, I caught a data transmission.

  More importantly, .2 seconds later, I caught targetControlSystem’s response.

  Got you, you piece of shit.

  But something about the view from Scout Two bothered me. It had been bothering me for a while, but I had been too agitated to pay attention.

  A lot of my ability to do threat assessment (like pick potential hostiles out of crowds or tell which stupid boat is full of raiders instead of curious locals) is based on pattern matching off a database of human behaviors. The Targets were anomalous, but they weren’t so anomalous they didn’t exhibit the same basic types of behaviors as other humans. And something was off about their behavior in the control area foyer, something that couldn’t be accounted for by their overconfidence or the fact that they were all assholes.

  Scout Two watched the Targets waiting impatiently, standing around the control area foyer as Target Five tapped at the screen. Standing. Even after they had apparently realized that the noise from the sealed control area was a decoy, after their security update made them much less vulnerable to drone attacks, they had stood around and waited. (SecUnits weren’t allowed to sit down, ever, but humans and augmented humans did it every chance they had.)

  They hadn’t tried to search for us, they had stayed in the foyer, sending their targetDrones into the surrounding corridors but no further. We were hostiles trapped in an enclosed space with them, moving through it at will as far as they knew. Why weren’t they trying to protect themselves by making their own safe zone? Why hadn’t they at least found a compartment to lock themselves in? Were they relying completely on the targetDrones? Or were they waiting for outside help, because they knew they hadn’t long to wait?

  They hadn’t even bothered to sit down.

  It’s not like I didn’t already think this situation was really fucking bad, but I was beginning to think it was way fucking worse. Wormhole travel takes multiple cycles. The trip from our survey site back to Preservation had taken four Preservation Standard cycles (which were defined as twenty-eight Preservation Standard hours each) and it was considered a short trip, just to the edge of Preservation territory. There was no way we could be at our destination yet. Or any destination yet.

  I tapped Scout One, locked up in ART’s control area, and told it to look again at that display that showed ART’s hull, the wave patterns, and the time countdown.

  Scout One zipped back up to that console. The countdown was at two minutes fourteen seconds.

  Oh yeah, this … is an issue. I forwarded the input to Amena.

  Amena’s drone squad watched her eyes narrow in disbelief. That really looks like it’s counting down to a wormhole exit but that can’t be right.

  I was somewhat desperate for it not to be right. Wake Eletra and ask her how long the ship was in the wormhole, how long it took them to get from the system where they were captured to Preservation territory.

  Amena scooted around to touch Eletra’s shoulder. After long seconds Eletra stirred. Amena asked the question. Eletra blinked, more aware, and her expression turned puzzled. “We never left the system. We’ve been here the whole time.”

  “No, you came through a wormhole to Preservation where we were captured. Now we’re going somewhere else. Remember the gray person said we were in the bridge-transit?” Amena tried to persist, but Eletra’s eyelids were drooping and she didn’t respond. Amena sent to me, She’s still really confused. Earlier they both thought we’d been captured before they were, and they didn’t believe me when I tried to tell them we weren’t.

  I told her, This thing on the engine housing is an alien remnant. I think it’s taking us through the wormhole at a much faster rate. Much faster. Not hours instead of cycles, but minutes instead of cycles. ART’s engines had been compromised by a device that was using the wormhole in a completely different way, allowing travel faster than any transport technology that I’d seen in media, or heard about on the newsfeeds. Faster than any human transport technology. I think we’re about to come out into normal space.

  Amena shook her head. No, that’s bonkos. The timer must be damaged. We’ve only been in the wormhole for a few hours, we can’t be anywhere yet. The closest inhabited system outside Preservation territory is fifteen days from Station at least—

  And then the engines made a noise somewhere between a groan and a clunk. A new display sprung up in front of Scout One: a view of normal space. We had just come out of the wormhole.

  Amena froze, staring at the feed view of the new display. Her eyes widened in alarm. Then she said, What should we do?

  That was a really good question.

  My first thought was to try to destroy the alien remnant. Fortunately instead of doing that I went on to the next thought. (I don’t know anything about transport engines but I know you shouldn’t shoot at them, okay? They’re near the top of the long list of things it’s just obviously not a good idea to shoot at.) I needed more intel before I could do anything about this. I didn’t like the idea of saying “I don’t know” to Amena because humans panic and I almost don’t blame them because right now I feel like panicking and I was not in control of this situation and I could see at least ten instances now where I’d made wrong decisions and being in control of the situation was really important because otherwise it was in control of me and that felt like a short step to being back in the company’s control. And maybe I just had to trust Amena, who had tackled a much larger human because she had thought she needed to save me. I told her, I don’t know.

  Amena sat up straight, biting her lip. Then she whispered to herself, “All right, all right. Let’s think.” On the feed, sounding much calmer than she looked, she said, Can you make that drone in the control area move around? If we can see a display that will tell us where we are, or if there’s a station or someplace we can try to send a distress signal …

  That … wasn’t a bad idea. I exited the platform and went back up through the gravity well, telling Scout One to do a sweep of any active display surfaces. As its input filled with images, I pulled my archived video of its previous survey and ran a comparison. I was able to isolate five displays with significant changes. I enlarged them and set the images up in our feed so we could page through them. This one, Amena said immediately, this is local navigation. There’s info on the star … it doesn’t say if we’re close to the station … or if there’s a station at all …

  I reached the monitoring area with its poor dead repair drone. I could see the display Amena was interpreting, but I’d found another diagram of ART on a new display. An indicator showed something attached to the outside of ART’s hull, on its lab module. Looking at the specifications … For fuck’s sake, it couldn’t be.

  I’d shut off our comm because I didn’t want the Targets using it to track us, plus it wasn’t like anybody could contact us while we were in the wormhole. I reactivated it and checked the channel our survey had used. It was active.

  Yeah, this was happening. I pinged the channel and got an immediate response, and transferred it to our feed relay.
Amena clapped a hand to her head in shock. “What—”

  A familiar voice said, SecUnit, Amena, can you hear me?

  It was Arada. Amena gasped, Oh, we’re here, we’re here! Where are you?

  Arada said, We’re in the facility’s safepod, attached to the hull of the raider ship. You’re onboard, correct? We saw you pulled toward the airlock.

  Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. They were supposed to be safe on the baseship, arriving at Preservation Station by now. I said, Who’s we?

  SecUnit! Arada said, clearly happy to hear from me. Oh, Overse is here, and Thiago and Ratthi. We weren’t able to reach the baseship after jettison and were dragged into the wormhole with the attacker.

  Should we try to get to you? Amena asked. She hopped off Eletra’s gurney and bounced on her toes. We’ve got an injured person with us.

  Arada said hastily, No, no, the pod’s too damaged. We didn’t expect— Someone in the background, probably Overse, yelled something urgent, but it was muffled and I’d have to analyze the audio to understand it. Arada changed whatever she was about to say to, What’s your situation there?

  Oh, there was a lot Arada wasn’t telling us. But I was estimating a 70 percent chance that if we hadn’t exited the wormhole so absurdly early, Arada and the others wouldn’t have survived much longer.

  So now I had four more humans to worry about. Fantastic.

  Amena was giving Arada a rapid but somewhat garbled report on all the fun we’d been having, and warning her about the Targets.

  (The Targets couldn’t be alien, could they? No, that wasn’t possible. Aliens couldn’t look that much like humans.)

  (Could they?)

  I sent Arada a schematic of the outside of ART’s hull with the airlock in our safe zone highlighted. Arada, can you get to this lock?

  There was a pause which told me that their situation was even worse than Arada was implying. I estimated the hesitation was just long enough for her to check the air reserves in the EVAC suits they were probably already wearing due to damage to the pod. Then Arada said firmly, Yes, we can make that. ETA, say, three minutes.