Network Effect

by Martha Wells

Right, hear me out. The message packet with the World Hoppers video clip had been sent through ART’s internal comm before it went down, presumably not long after ART hid a backup copy of itself passcode-protected by my hard feed address. ART had been expecting me to be aboard at some point to run its emergency code, which would uncompress the backup and reload it into its hardware. Which meant it had sent the Targets to find me in Preservation space and given them the ability to track me via the comm I had stashed in my rib compartment.

  Which meant ART had been conscious and capable of affecting events during the attack on our facility and baseship.

  ART’s sudden and obviously intentionally dramatic reentrance into the general feed and comm conversation had made the humans tense. It startled Eletra into awareness. “Who’s that?” she asked, looking from Ratthi to Amena.

  “It’s the … the transport,” Ratthi told her, watching the ceiling warily. “I don’t suppose you could call it a bot pilot.”

  I don’t suppose you could, ART said.

  Listening from the control area, Arada’s brows drew together. She asked Overse, “Could we get a display link to Medical?”

  ART said, It’s better if I do it, and a holo display of Arada and Overse in the control area blossomed in the center of Medical. Scout One showed me that a corresponding display of Medical had unfolded in the control area. There was an attached sidebar in both displays showing Thiago out in the foyer area, sitting in a chair with the Targets’ screen device in his lap. He looked wary.

  Okay, so: (1) I had never been able to access cameras aboard ART, except through its drones. It saw the interior of the ship through its internal sensors, which provided data (heat, density, angles of motion, etc.) that didn’t translate into visual images, at least not visual images useful to humans. I thought it didn’t have cameras in most areas. This was proof it had been holding out on me AGAIN. (2) The video effects were smoother and more polished than anything I could have done and that just made me more furious. This was a vid conference link for humans trying to figure out how screwed they were, not a professional newsfeed production. ART had dissolved the edges and corrected the color just to show off. Next it would be providing theme music and a mission logo.

  My performance reliability hit 60 percent and I could talk again. I said, “Fuck you, ART.”

  Amena leaned over the platform, watching me worriedly. “SecUnit, how are you doing?”

  “I’m fine.” Parts of the surgical suite were withdrawing and I could see her with my eyes now instead of just the drones. “Except that I’m being held prisoner by a giant asshole of a research transport.”

  Ratthi hobbled over and stopped outside the sterile field. “Do you need anything?”

  Amena said, “I saw what happened. I mean, I still had the view through your eyes when—” She stopped and swallowed. “That was intense.”

  That was one word for it. I sat up as the rest of the suite pulled away. The skin on my back felt new and itchy. I hate that. “I need my jacket.”

  ART said, It was damaged and is being repaired in the recycler.

  It was very hard to say evenly, “I am not speaking to you.”

  Ratthi lifted his brows. “So … how well do you two know each other?”

  In the control area, Arada stood up. “Uh, Ratthi, let’s take that up later. Transport, will you answer our questions now?”

  ART said, That depends on the questions.

  I said, “The humans think I’m an asshole, wait till they get to know you.”

  I thought you weren’t speaking to me.

  Ratthi muttered to Amena, “I admit I’m a little worried right now.”

  Amena told him, “SecUnit said bot pilots can kill people.”

  ART said, SecUnit exaggerates.

  Arada’s brow was furrowed. “Transport, where are we? We’ve accessed your sensors and we’re not receiving any contacts indicating a station. Is this an uninhabited system?”

  This system has a numerical designation assigned by a corporation which was investigating it for salvage. It was the site of at least two attempts at colonization. The latest attempt was abandoned when the company funding it was destroyed in a hostile takeover, and the colony’s location was lost. ART paused for 8.3 seconds for no reason I could think of except to make the humans think it wasn’t going to answer the question. I have evidence indicating that it is inhabited.

  Arada has a lot of expressions, even for a human. The one she was wearing now involved squinting one eye and twisting her mouth around and biting one corner of her lip. I didn’t know what it meant, except that she must be worried by what she was hearing. “It’s inhabited by these people—the hostiles?”

  Circumstances suggest it.

  Yeah, that was sarcastic.

  Arada stopped biting her lip but her eye got more squinty. “What is your operational status? You said the alien remnant detached from your engines? Can we leave now via the wormhole?”

  I am currently still in reinitialization mode and my normal-space maneuvering functions are not responding, possibly due to damage caused when the foreign device was installed on the wormhole drive. When reinitialization completes, I can begin self-repair. But I have absolutely no intention of leaving this system until I get what I want.

  Oh, here we go.

  Ratthi made a faint “oof” noise. Thiago’s jaw started to drop but he stopped it in time. Amena folded her lips in and glanced worriedly at me. Overse grimaced and rubbed her eyes. Arada looked like she wasn’t exactly surprised. She did a quick silent-communication expression thing back and forth with Overse, then she said evenly, “I see. What do you want?”

  I want my crew back.

  Arada’s brows lifted, like she was relieved it wasn’t something worse. “What happened to them?”

  The hostiles stole them, forced me to cooperate by threatening their welfare, infected my engines with interdicted alien remnant technology, installed adversarial software, and then deleted me.

  I was still mad, right? But there were a lot of keywords there that invoked involuntary responses.

  Thiago kept his expression neutral. “But how are you talking to us if—”

  I saved a backup copy and hid it where only a trusted friend could find it.

  I was looking at the wall, watching everyone and the display with Amena’s drones. Trusted friend? “Oh, fuck you.”

  That still counts as speaking.

  Arada and Overse looked at each other again. Overse widened her eyes and did a slight shoulder movement. Arada’s mouth set in a grim line, then she took a breath and asked, “Is SecUnit right, did you plan to attack our facility?”

  It was not my plan.

  Overse’s eyes had narrowed. She said, “But it was your idea.”

  I said, “Don’t humor it.”

  Arada’s tone was still even. “It wasn’t your plan, but you made it happen. You sent those people after us—after SecUnit.”

  ART said, I did.

  Of course it did.

  “You knew where we were?” Ratthi frowned. “How?”

  When I arrived through the Preservation wormhole, I sent messages inquiring after humans who I knew were associated with SecUnit. The Free Preservation Institute of Discovery and Engineering was most helpful when I asked for a possible meeting with Survey Specialist Arada. They sent me complete information on your itinerary and team.

  Of course they had. I had heard ART pretend to be human on the comm before, on the RaviHyral transit station.

  Ratthi groaned and covered his face. Arada and Overse stared at each other incredulously. Overse muttered, “We have got to talk to them about that.”

  Arada rubbed a spot over her left eye like it hurt. She said to ART, “So you knew when we’d be coming back to Preservation space.”

  You were early.

  Arada was sticking to the point. “But why did you want to kidnap SecUnit?”

  I needed someone who could kill the hostiles.

  Ev
eryone looked at me. I dug my fingers into the edge of the med platform. The skin on them itched, too, where the surgical suite had fixed the burned parts. “You told them I was a weapon, that they could use.”

  I built a trap, they entered it of their own accord.

  “But who are they?” Amena said, frustrated. “Where did they come from? Are they supposed to look like that? Did something happen to them to make them this way?”

  ART said, I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.

  Thiago looked down at Target Six. “There’s a possibility their appearance is the result of genetic or cosmetic manipulation. But…”

  Ratthi finished, “But we have an alien remnant on the drive, that does suggest possible contamination…”

  That’s why humans and augmented humans are so cautious around alien remnants that even corporations mostly try to be careful. Strange synthetics are usually harmless, emphasis on the “usually.” But organic elements can be really dangerous, where “really” means everyone dies horribly and nobody can ever go to the planet again.

  Thiago’s mouth tightened. “If any of these people had been left alive, perhaps we could have asked them.”

  I thought that was a shot at me, but ART apparently didn’t take it well. It said, If you’ll put that one on the medical platform, I can cut it open and see.

  I was unimpressed, having heard ART’s “villain of a long-running mythic adventure serial” voice before, but all the humans got quiet. Amena shifted uncertainly and looked at me. Then Ratthi whispered, “Was that a subtle threat?”

  I said, “No. It wasn’t subtle.”

  Amena hugged herself, then said, “How did the gray people steal your crew?”

  ART said, There was a catastrophic event when my crew and I first entered this system. My memory archive was disrupted and I’m still attempting to reconstruct it.

  Oh, fantastic. I said, “Is your comm shut down?”

  It was not an attack launched via the comm, because I’m not an idiot.

  “And I’m not the one who got taken down by a viral malware attack, so maybe you are an idiot,” I said. Yeah, I was all over the place with that one.

  ART said, It was not a viral malware attack, it was an unidentified event.

  “That’s fucking reassuring.”

  “Hey, hey!” Amena waved an arm, snapping her fingers. “Please don’t stop telling us what happened! So your crew were taken prisoner by these gray people, correct? And are the gray people from the lost colony that Eletra’s ship was looking for?”

  Everybody turned to look at Eletra, who stared blearily back.

  ART said, Those are logical assumptions, though I have no direct evidence to support them. I know that we arrived in this system in response to a distress call from a corporate reclamation expedition. At some point, I experienced a catastrophic system malfunction that caused me to reinitialize. After the reinitialization, I found the intruders aboard. They said they were holding my crew hostage, and demanded weapons. I offered a weapon.

  Everybody looked at me again.

  Arada did the lip-biting thing. “You brought them to SecUnit. Because you knew SecUnit would be able to handle the situation.”

  I did.

  “The attack on our baseship could have killed all of us,” Thiago said, some heat creeping into his voice.

  No shit, Thiago, you think?

  Ratthi hissed under his breath, but before he could tell Thiago to shut up, ART said, That was a chance I was willing to take.

  Oh, okay. I was either having a processing error, or something that the shows I watch call a “rage blackout,” or another emotional collapse. So I pushed off the med platform, walked out of the sterile field and into the restroom, and slammed my hand on the hatch close control.

  9

  After twenty-seven minutes and twelve seconds, Ratthi tapped on the hatch and sent me the feed message: Can I come in and talk to you?

  I sent back, Do you have my jacket?

  There was a pause. I was keyword-monitoring my inputs, the way I used to back when I was rented out on contracts, to make sure no one was screaming for help. But with ART back online, it was unlikely. Unless ART had decided to murder everybody in which case shit was going to get real. But that was also unlikely, because ART kept trying to contact me and I doubted it was planning a mass murder while also composing messages about how I was ungrateful and also wrong and being a sulky dumbass (not in those exact words but that’s what it meant) and why wouldn’t I fucking talk to it and you get the idea. Then Ratthi said, I’ve got it.

  He meant the jacket. Then you can come in.

  There was another pause. Then Ratthi asked, Can Amena come in, too?

  I thumped my head back against the wall. I was sitting on the counter next to the sink and running episode 237 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in background so I could pretend to be watching it during the 400+ times ART had pinged me.

  (You may have noticed, my processing capacity allows me to think about a lot of things and do a lot of things at the same time, more than humans, augmented humans, or lower functioning bots can. ART’s processing capacity made me look like I was moving in slow motion. This made ART capable of both enormous patience and also of becoming furious when it didn’t get what it wanted immediately. It was one of the few ways I could successfully mess with it.)

  I had cleaned off all the blood and fluid with the hygiene unit but was too angry to take a shower. (Showers are nice and I wanted to stay angry.) One of ART’s long-sleeved crew T-shirts had fallen out of the recycler at one point. My first impulse was to throw it away, but I needed it, so I pulled it on over my head and threw what was left of my shirt on the floor. Now I was sitting with my boots on the polished counter surface. I hoped it was annoying ART. I was assuming it had a sensor view in here if not a camera view.

  I didn’t want to upset Amena any more than I already had, so I sent, Yes.

  The hatch slid open and Ratthi and Amena stepped in. Ratthi had gotten his knee fixed and wasn’t limping anymore. He shut the hatch and Amena went to the other end of the sink counter and boosted herself up to sit on it. She curled her legs up, watching me worriedly. I said, “It can hear anything you say anywhere aboard.”

  Ratthi handed me my jacket with a smile. “Yes, but I’m used to that.”

  (Yes, I got that that was about me.)

  The jacket had been recycler-cleaned and the material rewoven to fix the burned parts and holes. Ratthi sighed, leaned against the wall and said, “So, you have a relationship with this transport.”

  I was horrified. Humans are disgusting. “No!”

  Ratthi made a little exasperated noise. “I didn’t mean a sexual relationship.”

  Amena’s brow furrowed in confusion and curiosity. “Is that possible?”

  “No!” I told her.

  Ratthi persisted, “You have a friendship.”

  I settled back in the corner and hugged my jacket. “No. Not—No.”

  “Not anymore?” Ratthi asked pointedly.

  “No,” I said very firmly. ART had stopped pinging me but I knew it was listening. It’s like having a malign impersonal intelligence that is incapable of minding its own business reading over your shoulder.

  Ratthi’s expression was doing a neutral yet skeptical thing that was really annoying. He said, “Have you made many friends who are bots?”

  I thought about poor dead Miki, who had wanted to be my friend. There was a 93 percent chance Miki had wanted to be everybody’s friend, but Miki had said to me “I have human friends, but I never had a friend like me before.” I said, “No. It’s not like that. Not like it is between humans.”

  Ratthi was still skeptical. “Is it? The Transport seems to think differently.”

  I said, “The Transport doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about, plus it lies a lot, and it’s mean.”

  A minute, undetectable in the range of human eyesight, fluctuation in the lights told me ART had h
eard that.

  “Why do you call it ART?” Amena asked. “It said its name was Perihelion.”

  I told her, “It’s an anagram. It stands for Asshole Research Transport.”

  Amena blinked. “That’s not an anagram.”

  “Whatever.” Human words, there’s too many of them, and I don’t care.

  “Regardless,” Ratthi said, “I think that while you and Perihelion know how to have relationships with humans, neither of you is quite sure how to have a relationship with each other.”

  It still sounded disgusting. “Do you have to call it a relationship?”

  Ratthi shrugged one shoulder. “You don’t like the word ‘friendship.’ What else is there?”

  I had no idea. I did a quick search on my archives and pulled out the first result. “Mutual administrative assistance?”

  The lights fluctuated again, in what I could tell was a really sarcastic way. I yelled, “I know what you’re doing, ART, stop trying to communicate with me!”

  Amena looked around the room, trying to see what I was reacting to. Ratthi sighed again. He said, “I don’t know if you’ve been listening to what we’ve been doing outside this restroom, but Arada and Thiago have been negotiating with Perihelion and have come to an arrangement. We will help locate and hopefully free its crew, and it will give us any assistance needed to return to Preservation space.”

  “That’s not an arrangement,” I said, “that’s just doing what it wants.”

  “We know.” Ratthi made a helpless gesture. “But we don’t have any other choice. Even if it would let us send a distress beacon through the wormhole to the nearest station, that station would be in Corporation Rim territory. And we’re in a so-called ‘lost’ system that has been claimed as salvage by a corporate, which makes us in violation of a lot of their laws, plus we’re in a transport that had alien remnant technology installed on its drive. Telling whoever responds to the call that the transport was modified against its will is not going to get us anywhere but buried under massive fines, and it might be even worse for Perihelion’s crew and their university.”

  He was right about all that but it was actually worse than he thought. “This is not like Preservation Alliance territory. You can only get a station responder when you’re inside a station’s defined area of influence, and they won’t forward distress beacons and they don’t send responders through wormholes. At most, they’ll pass the call to a local retrieval company, which would contact us and contract to rescue us. We’d have to pay them up front, and probably end up owing the station for passing the call along, though that depends on local regulations.”