Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  Thiago watched Amena thoughtfully, as if he suspected she was talking to me on the feed. Then Eletra’s expression started to drift again and he hurriedly distracted her with a question about her family.

  Amena said on our private feed, You’re going with Arada?

  Yes, I told her.

  Amena said, If there were three SecUnits on the explorer, why didn’t they stop the Targets from … taking over, or whatever they did? And the Targets didn’t seem to have any idea what you were.

  I told her, The SecUnits on the explorer would have been under the control of a supervisor, either directly or through a HubSystem. If the Targets got control of either, the SecUnits would have to obey an order to stand down. Which is why I hate hostage situations. You have to get in there fast and neutralize the hostage-takers. They can’t make threats and force you to do stuff you don’t want to do if they’re unconscious or dead. If the Targets knew what I was, they may have thought they could order you to stop me.

  Amena snorted. Sure, right.

  Amena was implying that I wouldn’t listen to her, which, right, I wouldn’t, not in that situation. But also, there was so much about the Targets that we didn’t understand. It was a data vacuum big enough for us all to fall in and die, including ART.

  Arada’s expression had gone preoccupied. The Barish-Estranza manager had sent the specs for the needed supplies and transfer logistics and she was going over it with ART in the feed. Then she asked me, “So they’ll know you’re a SecUnit because Eletra will tell them, so … how should we handle that?”

  I wasn’t sure what “that” meant. But I wasn’t sure Arada knew what “that” meant, either. Her experience with SecUnits was limited to exclusively me. I said, “I’ll be the SecUnit the University provided for your security.”

  I really expected ART to weigh in here, at least with some kind of rude noise. But it didn’t comment.

  Listening on the feed, Ratthi was dubious about the whole idea. Wouldn’t you be wearing armor then?

  “Not necessarily. Some contracts require SecUnits to patrol living spaces and that’s usually done in uniform instead of armor.” There are standardization guides for the manufacture of constructs but most humans wouldn’t know that. As long as I didn’t have to walk into a deployment center filled with SecUnits and the human techs who built and disassembled us, my risk assessment module thought everything was great. (I know, it worries me when I say that, too.)

  Then ART said, Your configuration no longer matches SecUnit standard. ART knew all about that because it was the one who had altered my configuration to help me pass as an augmented human. That combined with the code I’d written to change the way I moved, to add the random movements, hesitations, blinking, and all the things that said “human” to other humans, made it easier to get by, though I’d still had to rely a lot on hacking weapons scanners.

  “That’s right.” Arada turned to me, her brow pinching up in worry. “You look different since we first met you. You’ve let your hair grow out a little.”

  Some of ART’s changes to my configuration had been subtle—longer head hair, more visible eyebrows, the kind of fine, nearly invisible hair humans had on large sections of their skin, the way my organic skin met my inorganic parts. Other changes had been structural, to make sure scanners searching for standard SecUnit specifications wouldn’t hit on me. “I also got shorter,” I told her.

  “Did you?” Startled, Arada stepped back, eyeing the top of my head.

  Lack of attention to detail is one of the reasons humans shouldn’t do their own security.

  But humans do detect subliminal details and react to them whether they’re consciously aware of it or not. Even on Preservation (especially on Preservation) I ran my code to make my movement and body language more human to keep from drawing attention. I was running it now out of habit. When I stopped it, I’d look a lot more like a “normal” SecUnit even without armor. (Normal = neutral expression concealing existential despair and brain-crushing boredom.)

  Arada and Ratthi still wanted to argue, so I said, “If they ask—and they won’t ask—say I’m an academic model designed specifically for your university.”

  ART said, I would prefer you go as an augmented human.

  What I really needed right now was a giant omniscient machine intelligence second-guessing me. “I don’t care what you prefer,” I said. It was safer this way. We were trying to tell one big lie—that we were ART’s crew—and it would be easier to make that believable if we kept the smaller lies to a minimum. The fact that I was a SecUnit and that Arada had contracted for me as security was true, if in a different way than the corporates would assume. I could have said all that, but instead I said, “It’s my decision and you can shut up.”

  “Don’t fight,” Amena said, coming back into the galley. Thiago was heading to the bulk lock to help Overse and Ratthi.

  Arada was still watching me dubiously, absently humming and tapping her teeth, and I realized there was another problem. To Arada, I wasn’t her SecUnit, I was her coworker and she was my team captain. That’s a whole different spectrum of body language. Also, she wasn’t even slightly afraid of me, and even my most confident and contemptuous corporate clients had always been just a little nervous, no matter how hard they tried to cover it. (The ones who weren’t confident and contemptuous were incredibly nervous. It hadn’t exactly been fun for me, either.) I asked her, “Can you treat me like a SecUnit?”

  On the feed, Overse said, Ummm. She asked Arada, Can you?

  “Sure.” Arada shrugged, clearly having absolutely no idea what we meant by that.

  Down in the module dock with Ratthi, Overse sighed. She told me, Right. I’ll work on that with her real quick before you go.

  I tapped her feed in acknowledgment. Arada demanded, “What?”

  * * *

  I went into an empty bunkroom to change into the crew uniform ART had just made me. It was dark blue, the pants and jacket of a deflective fabric that was way better than what Preservation Station Security had, with lots of sealable pockets for weapons and drones, plus stability-fabric boots so tough I could probably use them to jam a closing hatchway open. It looked like what a human security person would wear, it looked like what a SecUnit should wear instead of a cheaper version of the contract’s uniform. I don’t know, maybe security-company-owned SecUnits wore something like this. It had ART’s crew logo on the jacket, but somehow that didn’t bother me as much as usual.

  I was a little worried the hair on my head would be noticed. After Milu, I had made it this length so I wouldn’t look like a SecUnit and now I had to look like a SecUnit again. ART, watching me watching myself in a camera while poking at my head, pointed me to the bunkroom’s attached bath where there was a dispenser for things humans needed. One was a lubricant-like substance that when I followed the instructions flattened my hair down so it looked shorter. That looked more SecUnit-like. Since ART had apparently decided to be helpful and stop sulking like a giant angry baby, I said, “Why do you want me to pretend to be an augmented human? This way is easier.”

  You don’t like it, ART said.

  “That’s my problem.” I didn’t like it. But if you put everything that had happened to me on a scale of awfulness and assigned exact values to each incident (which I had done once, it’s in my archive somewhere) dealing with corporates who exploited failed colonies, and probably went through SecUnits as fast as Amena did fried vegetable crunchy things, was in the lower third of the chart.

  Despite what I’d told Amena, the existence of the SecUnits on the explorer worried me. If they had been captured and not destroyed, they were a way for the Targets to get intel about what I was capable of.

  When my crew is at risk, it’s my problem, ART said.

  I was getting tired of being told what to do. Self-determination was a pain in the ass sometimes but it beat the alternative by a lot.

  I made sure my collar was folded down so you could see my data port (though anybod
y who tried to stick a combat override module in there was going to get a violent surprise) and walked calmly out of the bunkroom into the galley. Amena was sitting on the table, frowning at me. She said, “What are you two fighting about now?”

  ART said, I made SecUnit’s uniform too nice.

  Amena nodded. “You do look great.”

  I’m not even going to dignify that with a reaction.

  Arada came back to the galley in her crew uniform, which was a less combat-ready version of mine. It was casual and practical and she looked comfortable and natural in it, which would help. “Are we ready?” she asked. “Let’s go.”

  “Surely they won’t suspect anything,” Ratthi was saying to the others at the bulk dock. “Who runs around with a friendly rogue SecUnit? Besides us, I mean.”

  12

  We used ART’s EVAC suits, which were better than the ones the Preservation survey owned. (They had secondary internal protective suits for planetary exploration, not that we’d need them on the transport.) Though first I ran checks to make sure there was no contamination in their onboard systems. (It was unlikely—the power usage stats said the suits had been inactive throughout ART’s whole memory disruption incident—but I was going to be paranoid until I figured out how ART had been attacked.) (I mean, I’ll be paranoid after that, too, but only about the usual things.)

  We were taking Eletra with us, and Arada had offered to bring Ras’s body over, too, but Leonide had said it wasn’t necessary and we could dispose of it. That upset the humans and it sort of upset me, too, which you wouldn’t think it would, since the organic parts of dead SecUnits (and the parts that get shot off, cut off, crushed, whatever) go into the recyclers. But it did. As Ratthi put it, “You’d think they could at least pretend to give a damn.”

  ART had closed in to the Barish-Estranza transport and used its cargo tractors to maneuver the container of repair supplies over to the transport’s module dock. Then Arada and I made the short trip to the transport’s starboard airlock, with Eletra’s suit in tow.

  (On the way over, I made sure I had a private channel with Arada’s EVAC suit, and I told her, “Remember, I’m not your coworker or your employee or your bodyguard. I’m a tool, not a person.” Overse had told her this earlier but I wanted to make sure she understood.

  Arada made an unhappy noise. After 3.2 seconds, she said, “I understand. Don’t worry.”)

  Preservation’s ships are different, so stepping onto a Corporation Rim transport was familiar in a weird way. (A weirdly unpleasant way that disrupted the organic parts of my insides.) I had been shipped as cargo to all my contracts, so 90 percent of my experience with transports and bot pilots was after Dr. Mensah bought me and I’d left Port FreeCommerce. At least Eletra hadn’t lied about the lack of SecUnits aboard; there was no HubSystem in place and they were using their own brand of proprietary tech and not company-standard. But the architecture was similar enough that by the time Arada and I cycled through the lock, their SecSystem thought I had full interactive permissions and their bot pilot had accepted me as a priority contact.

  I could do a lot with that. They were lucky we weren’t here to hurt them.

  The airlock foyer held four humans in the red-brown Barish-Estranza corporate livery, under heavy tactical gear and helmets, all armed with projectile weapons. (My ex-owner bond company would never have paid for such nice equipment. Barish-Estranza must put a lot of effort into their branding.)

  Problem? Arada asked me on our private channel that I had made certain the transport’s SecSystem wouldn’t see.

  No. It’s security procedure. If it wasn’t, there was going to be a whole lot of trouble for Barish-Estranza.

  The first crew person/potential hostile said, “Remove your suits, please.”

  That was a relief. Taking out four armed humans while wearing an EVAC suit would have been annoying.

  As my suit opened and I stepped out, I detected a subliminal release of tension that made my threat assessment drop by 3 percent. (Note: humans do not generally look relieved when a SecUnit appears, so I doubted they knew what I was. But I was 95 percent certain they were reacting to the fact that I wasn’t a gray Target person.) When Eletra, then Arada stepped out of their suits, the threat assessment dropped a solid 10 percent.

  They clearly recognized Eletra, and she recognized them, in a confused way. An unarmed crew member with a personnel resources feed-tag came forward to take her arm and lead her away.

  Another crew person said, “This way, Dr. Arada.”

  They led us through another hatch and down a utilitarian corridor, then into a meeting room. It had a circle of low-backed padded couches in the center around a large floating display bubble. Everything was newish and well kept (no aging upholstery here) with bars of decorative abstract designs in Barish-Estranza colors on the walls and padded seats.

  Leonide was already waiting on the couch. She said, “Dr. Arada,” and gestured to a seat opposite her. The supply transport’s comm vid might have been doing some cosmetic editing, too, because in person faint stress and fatigue signs were visible around Leonide’s eyes and mouth, though she still looked perfect enough to be in a media serial.

  “Supervisor Leonide.” Arada nodded. As she sat down, I stepped back against the wall behind her. The crew escort, who had followed us in and distributed themselves around the room, reacted with a little uneasiness. They had guessed I was a bodyguard but I had dropped my pretend-human code while I was still in the EVAC suit and it was starting to register with them that I might not be an augmented human. (Despite the weapons and heavy gear, they were amateurs.) (Amateurs are terrifying.)

  Leonide glanced at me, her perfect brow furrowing. “Your bodyguard…” Then her eyes narrowed. “Is that…”

  “A SecUnit,” Arada said. I knew her well enough to hear the nervous jitter in her voice but I don’t think anyone else noted it. (They were too busy being nervous about me.) Arada remembered not to glance at me, which was good. She and Ratthi both had a bad habit of doing that when they answered questions about me, like they were checking for permission to talk about me, which is not how humans expect other humans to act around SecUnits.

  (SecUnits make humans and augmented humans uncomfortable and on my contracts, my clients had acted in a variety of nervous and inconsistent ways when I was around. (No matter how nervous they were, just assume I was more nervous.) But in a situation like this, it’s more about how other humans expect each other to act and not how humans actually act, which literally might be anything.)

  I had camera views via my new friend the Barish-Estranza supply transport’s SecSystem, and I watched two members of our crew escort exchange uneasy looks. Their feed activity was monitored by their supervisors so there wasn’t any private chatter, but one did send a safety notice to their bridge. The SecSystem poked me in response and I told it everything was fine, and it went back to happily interfacing with me again.

  “You don’t trust us?” Leonide said, her expression unreadable.

  This part, this kind of human dominance posturing, was the part Arada was really afraid she would screw up. Human dominance posturing was not something Arada did, at all. (And yeah, not something I could help with, either.)

  I thought there was a possibility that the other humans would notice her nerves, and that it might make them suspicious that Arada’s story about what had happened to us was a mashed-up mess of lies and truth. But the chance they would attribute her jumpiness to the fact that she had brought her rogue SecUnit friend aboard their transport was low. (Ratthi was right about that.)

  Arada managed to smile in a way that wasn’t too friendly and said, “I think we trust each other the same amount.” She added, “And I’m afraid our contract requires our SecUnit be present during off-ship first contacts.” (I had told Arada about the magic words “the contract requires it.”)

  Leonide’s knit brow unknit slightly and she sent a “maintain position” feed code to her escort, who pretended to thi
nk there was something they could have done about me if they hadn’t been ordered not to try. “Of course.”

  I watched the tension release slightly in Arada’s shoulders. She knew she had used the right tone and it gave her some confidence. She leaned forward. “Can you tell me what happened to your transport? Because I think it’s very similar to what happened to mine.”

  Leonide didn’t react immediately; I suspected she was surprised by the direct approach. Arada saw the hesitation and said, “I can go first, if you like.”

  You would think Leonide would go for that, but apparently she wanted control of the conversation. She said, “Not necessary.” She shifted her position slightly. “You understand the former colony planet in this system is now wholly owned by Barish-Estranza.”

  Arada kept her expression calm and serious though I knew she still found the idea of owning a planet to be as bizarre as owning me. “Of course.”

  Leonide acknowledged that with a nod. “Our arrival here and initial scan of the system was uneventful, and we went into orbit while our explorer approached the colony’s space dock. They reported that it was surprisingly still intact and operational, which was good news for our reclamation effort. Bringing in a new one to assemble would be a considerable expense. Instead of a shuttle, the contact team elected to use the dock’s drop box to reach the surface.” Her mouth tightened. “Possibly that was a mistake.”

  I could tell from Arada’s intent expression that she wanted to interrupt, but she didn’t. SecSystem was helpfully giving me all its collected video and audio, already edited and with the major incidents tagged. Its comm and feed data confirmed Leonide’s story so far.

  “There was nothing but standard status reports from the explorer for more than fifty-seven hours,” Leonide continued. Actually according to their SecSystem it was 58.57 hours but whatever. “Then the drop box returned.”