Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  It didn’t reply, but I could feel it listening.

  I said, Once we get your drones fixed, we can have them check again for bio traces, but I don’t think we’ll find anything. I think that whatever happened, your humans were fine when they left here.

  ART said, Is that an indication they left voluntarily?

  It was a point to consider. Doing what ART would normally do (if it wasn’t emotionally compromised) and looking at just the verifiable data, we didn’t know if the crew had been abducted, left voluntarily, or escaped. Since ART’s two shuttles were still docked, we knew the crew hadn’t used them to leave.

  (Or the crew could have tried to escape and been spaced. I wasn’t going to mention it, because ART had to know that it was a possibility. But it might have eliminated it from its decision tree, knowing it couldn’t function otherwise. There was no point in considering it, not now. We had to search until we found an answer. If that was the answer … we’d deal with it then.) I said, We need to do a full inventory, particularly of your hand weapons storage. If your crew had to abandon you when the Targets compromised your systems, they may have forced their way onboard the explorer.

  The pause was long, 3.4 seconds. Then ART said, Agreed.

  And it hit me then that ART had been desperate and terrified since the moment the Barish-Estranza explorer had sidled up and done whatever it had done. It had tricked its captors into taking it to me not because it had some kind of grand strategy but because it needed me.

  I hate emotions.

  On the private channel between ART and me, I said, I apologize for calling you a fucker.

  It said, I apologize for kidnapping you and causing potential collateral damage to your clients.

  Amena was watching me, her brows drawn together. “Are you two talking?”

  “Yes.” I had to look at the wall now.

  Amena was still worried. “Are you fighting again or are you making up? Because it looks exactly the same from the outside.”

  We’re making up, ART told her.

  “Good.” Amena looked relieved. “Good, right. What’s next on our list?”

  * * *

  I went to search the Barish-Estranza transport shuttle. I wasn’t expecting to find anything but it was on the action list, so why not.

  ART had notified Arada that while it was working on the engines, it was also prepping a squad of pathfinders just in case we had to search the colony planet. (I hope it didn’t come to that. I don’t like planets.)

  Pathfinders are like drones for space, basically, active scanners that would zip around the planet collecting environmental information and terrain imaging, plus looking for comm signals, possible energy sources, and whatever might be planning to kill us. It’s the kind of thing that my ex-owner bond company did via satellite when they prepared to issue safety bonds for a newly opened survey planet. Except the company satellite would mainly be mapping the entire planet, and the pathfinders would be looking for potential locations where ART’s crew might be. They were really expensive, not something normal survey teams had access to. Arada was impressed.

  (You couldn’t rent pathfinders from the company, not only because of the cost. They made planetary exploration safer and more targeted, so therefore less need for massive bond companies to rent you all sorts of expensive planetary exploration gear and sell you expensive safety bonds.)

  I was monitoring Thiago’s casual conversation with Eletra while the med platform was doing a deep scan on her. Overse was in the maintenance bay reassembling the repair drone I had found in engineering so it could start repairing the other damaged drones. Arada was reviewing the scans of the alien engine remnant, but everything that was left of it seemed to be melting or decomposing so most of the data was garbage. (As Overse pointed out, the thing was illegal to have anyway so if it melted completely it would be for the best, but it looked like it was still going to leave a residue that would have to be scraped off ART’s engines.) Ratthi was shepherding a biohazard cleaning unit through the corridors and picking up pieces of dead targetDrones.

  Amena followed me to the shuttle, dragging her feet. (She really needed to sleep. I hadn’t heard anything from Arada about it so I put Humans need to take rest periods on the general action list. Up in the central corridor, Ratthi saw it and muttered, “Please, yes, soon.”)

  I did a brief visual check on both of ART’s shuttles, just to verify that they were empty and hadn’t been tampered with. The Barish-Estranza shuttle was parked inside the same docking module, attached to a module lock, which had an extendable tube to enclose the hatch. ART had said there was no one inside the shuttle, and no active bot pilot, but I made Amena hang back down the corridor with her assigned drones while I approached. The hatch was sealed, but not code-locked, which made sense when we thought Eletra and Ras were telling the truth about being captured trying to escape from their doomed transport. (Now that we were certain it hadn’t happened that way, who the hell knew?)

  ART had cut the shuttle off from the feed. I touched the lock cautiously. (Considering the inactive state of its onboard systems, I wasn’t expecting alien killware or a sentient virus or something else unspecified to leap across and infect me, but the fact remained that something had happened to ART despite all its protections, and alien killware was still a possibility.) I still couldn’t pick up any feed activity, so I pushed up one sleeve and adjusted my energy weapon to deliver a pulse that caused the seal to disengage. The hatch slid open, releasing a puff of slightly stale air. It didn’t have the algae/growth medium smell associated with the Targets; in fact, it had traces of the dirty sock smell associated with humans. But then an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or past absence. Whatever, you know what I mean.

  I used my own scan, making sure there was no movement or active weapons inside, and stepped in.

  The shuttle wasn’t a model I had been in before, but the configuration was similar to a standard transport shuttle. It was small, sized for ten humans at most, no cabins, a toilet facility that folded out from the bulkhead (ugh). The individual seats were in a spiral in the main compartment, so they would have to be cycled around to release each passenger for disembarking. It was obviously meant for short trips between ships or from ship-to-station. The cockpit had a seat for a human pilot next to the currently absent bot pilot’s interface console. The upholstery showed signs of ordinary wear and tear. The single passenger compartment was generally clean but there were scuff marks on the panels and padding. There was only a .01 percent chance it had been constructed as a trap by an alien intelligence. (It was a theory, okay.)

  On our private feed connection, Amena said, Is it empty? Is there anything strange in it? Can I come closer?

  You can come to the hatch, but not inside. I started searching for physical evidence. I would need to check all the storage compartments, anywhere there might be a hidden space that could conceal something. The drive housing still had the factory seal from its last maintenance check, so it probably hadn’t been infected with illegal alien remnant technology. I’d have to break the seal and do a visual inspection anyway, just to be certain. I also needed to pull the logs, but I’d have to do it via a display surface. Even with an inert operating system, I didn’t want to take any chances.

  Amena came up to the hatch and leaned inside to look around. “If you need me to do anything, I can do it.”

  I pinged her feed to acknowledge.

  She watched me search for seven minutes and forty seconds, then said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  I never know how to answer this. Should I go with my first impulse, which is always “no” or just give in to the inevitable? I said, “Is it contract-relevant?”

  Big, adolescent human sigh noise. “I just want to understand something.”

  I gave in to the inevitable. “Yes.”

  She hesitated. “Right, umm. So my second mom really didn’t ask you to break up me and Marne?”

  I had answered that question alread
y, back when it happened. I could get mad at her asking it again, but granted, I do lie a lot. “I wasn’t lying to you. She doesn’t know anything about it unless you told her.”

  I finished the search of the cabin and pinged ART. It generated a display surface with a disabled feed interface so it couldn’t transmit anything that might be in the shuttle’s systems to ART, me, or anything else.

  Amena still had questions. “Then why did you do it? You didn’t—you don’t—care about me. You didn’t really even know me then.”

  Why does ART like adolescent humans? This was exhausting. “I have files on all the members of Dr. Mensah’s family and their associates. I alerted on Marne because I ran threat assessments on all humans and augmented humans attempting to approach or form new relationships with Dr. Mensah or her family or associates after the GrayCris incident. Marne registered as a threat to you.”

  Amena thought about that while I made a connection between the console and the sequestered display surface. Then I started to run the shuttle’s raw log files on the display, filtering out anything that wasn’t text. I was recording the information visually, and then I could convert it back to data fields and search it more quickly. That way we’d get the log information without any underlying code that might be hidden in it. (There are visual elements that could cause me problems, but I could screen for those and granted, the chances that the log file might be protected against a SecUnit doing a visual download were running under 5 percent.) (I know, I’m paranoid, but that’s how I’ve avoided being rendered for spare parts all this time.) Amena said slowly, “I guess if he wasn’t … He would have wanted to explain himself, instead of running off and refusing to speak to me again.”

  As far as my threat assessment was concerned, running off and never seeing her again was an excellent result. I was pretty sure Amena wouldn’t want to hear that, though.

  She continued, “I thought he was nice. I’m not … I know at the time I said I knew what I was doing, but I’m actually not very good at meeting new people.”

  I knew from threat assessments on Ratthi’s associates that he had a lot of relationships with all genders of humans and augmented humans and he and they all seemed very happy about it. Amena should ask him for advice. I didn’t think she wanted to hear that, either.

  Then Amena said, “Do you love my second mother? Thiago thinks so.”

  I should have known this was going to turn into an interrogation. I said, “Not the way he thinks.”

  Her face went all dubious. “I don’t think you know what he thinks.”

  He doesn’t know what I think, either, so there. I was distracted converting a dumpload of raw log info from a visual image back into searchable data and if I got the fields wrong it was going to be a giant mess. I probably should have just stopped talking, but I didn’t want to hurt Amena’s feelings. I said, “Your second mother is…” Client wasn’t the right word, not anymore. “My teammate.” I could see I had to clarify. It was really hard finding the right words. “Before your second mother, I had never been an actual member of a team before. Just an…”

  Amena finished, “An appliance for a team.”

  That was it. “Yes.”

  “I see. Thank you for letting me ask you questions.”

  ART must be recovering because it had to butt in with, Tell her you care about her. Use those words, don’t tell her you’ll eviscerate anything that tries to hurt her.

  ART, fuck off.

  The thing ART has in common with human adolescents is that it doesn’t like to hear the word “no,” either. It persisted, Tell her. It’s true. Just say it. Human adolescents need to hear it from their caretakers.

  I’m not a caretaker, I told ART. I finished the log conversion and checked my drone view of Amena. She was leaning in the hatchway, her head propped on the seal buffer. (That isn’t a good place to put your head, just FYI.) From her expression, she was either falling asleep or deep in thought. Or possibly both. I said, “You need to sleep.”

  She yawned. “Okay, third mom.”

  * * *

  Arada finally ordered the others to take a rest period, though it took her a while to really understand that ART and I would still be active and there was no reason for the humans to take shifts. (I finally had to tell her that I had a list of things I needed to get done and it would go much faster if they would all stay in one place and shut up for a while and sleeping was the most efficient use of that time.)

  Overse had finished repairing the repair drone and sent it off to begin the rebuilds of ART’s other drones. She was sleeping on a couch in the lounge next to the galley with Ratthi, who had finished the biohazard cleanup. There was snoring.

  Arada was sleeping in one of the station chairs on the control deck. (They’re very comfortable, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.)

  The medical scans had finished and Thiago walked Eletra back to her bunkroom. He hadn’t gotten much more out of her than Amena had, though his questions were more subtle. With his prompting, Eletra had gone over her augment clock and was now severely confused. It showed their transport had been in this system for forty-three corporation standard days. She was certain that was wrong. It was more support for the theory that Eletra had undergone some kind of memory manipulation. The initial scan analysis showed no genetic manipulation, no hidden devices or non-human biologicals.

  All my remaining drones were on sentry duty, but I made Amena go to an unused bunkroom near the galley because it was easier to defend if we were attacked by something. (It was unlikely, but so was everything unexpected that had happened so far. My risk assessment module had given up generating reports three hours ago.)

  Amena tried to just lie down on the bare bunk and pillow her head on the sealed bedding pack but I made her get up and unfold it and do it right. (“You’re mean,” she groaned.)

  I opened another bedding pack so my bunk would be more comfortable to sit on. I had a lot of coding and analysis to do so I wouldn’t be caught unprepared again. I needed to create workarounds for the drone-resistant camouflage on the targetDrones and countermeasures for the Target’s helmets and gear. I also needed to anticipate how targetControlSystem would countermeasure my countermeasures so I wouldn’t be screwed by an on-the-fly software update. I needed to analyze the solid-state screen device and find out if it really was a Pre–Corporation Rim relic. And I had to analyze the new data files I had just created from the shuttle’s logs.

  I pulled in the data Ratthi had uploaded to the feed during his pathology examinations and the scans of the Targets’ suits and helmets. Overse had also done some helpful hardware analysis of the targetDrones. Then I got my queries and processes running so I could get started on the code. I also split off an input and started World Hoppers episode 1. I’d seen it before (lots of times before) so I didn’t need to give it my full attention.

  (I really, really wanted some time to pull a new show out of longterm storage and watch a few episodes so I could really relax, but World Hoppers in background would help. It was also bait.)

  After twenty-seven minutes, it worked. I was aware of ART looming in my feed. (Imagine sitting in front of a display surface and someone eight times your size shoulders in and sits in the chair with you.) It was watching World Hoppers, and also backseat driving my coding and doing its own analysis of the data. The solid-state screen device does resemble known schematics of Pre–Corporation Rim technology, ART reported, showing me a scan and the matching examples. But it is not a factory-built unit; it was assembled from components gleaned from other devices of similar age. No trace of alien remnant or known strange synthetics detected.

  That made sense. It could have been a replacement unit built by humans in the Pre–Corporation Rim colony. Or a unit built by the later abandoned corporate humans, with parts desperately scavenged from the old colony, as their own tech resources failed and they struggled to survive.

  Yeah, corporations suck.

  I liked the code we were coming up with, but
I didn’t think it was enough. None of it was making my threat assessment stats look any better. I told ART, Everything we’re doing is defensive. We need an attack.

  I’ve considered constructing a killware assault, but the data I managed to retain from targetControlSystem suggests it would be ineffective. ART displayed some analysis for me. Both Ratthi and Overse have theorized that some elements of the Targets’ Pre–Corporation Rim technology—for example, the implants—may be acting as receivers for esoteric alien remnant tech, like the object that affected my drive. A standard killware assault on the Pre-CR systems would not be able to take into account the alien system, not unless it was variable and could alter its behavior based on the protections and obstructions it encounters. I can’t code that with the resources I have available.

  It was talking about something similar to the self-aware virus that GrayCris and Palisade Security had deployed against the company gunship, where I’d crashed myself and nearly wrecked my memory archive helping the bot pilot fight it off. Which gave me an idea, but I didn’t know if it was something we could implement.

  Then Thiago crossed through the galley, came down our corridor, and leaned in the doorway. Watching him through ART’s camera view, I saw him glance at Amena, who at the moment was an inert pile of limbs under a blanket with a pillow jammed into her face. (Humans do everything weird, including rest.) Then he looked at me. Keeping his voice low, he said, “May I join you?”

  ART engaged the sound/privacy field on Amena’s bunk. I thought about saying “no.” But I thought he wanted to sleep on one of the bunks within sight of Amena because he didn’t trust me to take care of her. So I marked my killware idea as save-for-later and said, “Yes.”