Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  And I promised Murderbot 2.0 I would deliver its clients here.

  Also, I don’t know where the rest of the task force is.

  Reply: I am a SecUnit aboard the shuttle designated—

  Response: I know you’re on the shuttle. Why are you approaching?

  Reply: I have retrieved five of my clients, and three unknown humans who were identified to me as your clients. There is no protocol for this. I don’t know what to tell it. Murderbot 2.0 sent me. Please advise.

  The helm locks me out. Something else has seized control. The display shows the shuttle is now being pulled toward the transport’s module dock. That’s where I was trying to go so I guess this is good.

  * * *

  The shuttle is pulled into dock and I get up from the pilot seat and face the hatch. I keep the hatch closed on the rear compartment until I can make sure this transport is non-hostile.

  I don’t know what to do if it is hostile.

  The docking process completes, sensor shows atmosphere on transport vessel is good. The hatch opens and two unknown humans stand there. Human 1: Feedname Ratthi, gender male, other information under temp lock. Human 2: Feedname Amena, gender female, note: juvenile, other information under temp lock.

  These humans are not unknown. Amena and Ratthi were in HelpMe.file. This is a relief and an indication that I am in the right place. There is a protocol for meeting humans who are not clients but who are associated with clients, and that protocol will apply here.

  Before I can speak, Ratthi waves and says, “Hello, hello. Perihelion says you’ve disabled your governor module. I’m Ratthi, and this is Amena. Please don’t be afraid, we won’t hurt you.”

  There is not a protocol for this.

  Transport, on private channel: If you even think about harming them, I will disassemble you and peel away your organic parts piece by piece before destroying your consciousness. Do we understand each other?

  I have no idea what this transport is and it is terrifying. I don’t know how to tell it I don’t want to hurt its clients. They are unarmed, and exhibit no threatening behavior toward my clients, the other unknown humans, or each other. Reply: I understand. I will comply.

  I tell the humans, “The clients need medical attention. They have been given implants by the hostiles who seized control of the Barish-Estranza Explorer Task Group. Quarantine procedures are recommended until the extent of the influence is determined.”

  Amena claps her hands and jumps up and down. “Perihelion, is this your crew?”

  Transport, public channel: Three of them are mine. Where are the others?

  I say, “All other clients aboard the explorer were dead, but there is reason to believe at least five of your clients were removed from the explorer earlier.”

  Another human enters the dock area, followed by a Medical drone in gurney configuration. Feedname Arada, gender female/fem, designated role temporary captain, other information under temporary lock. “Who are they? Perihelion, are they your crew?”

  A maintenance drone with multiple limbs has climbed into the shuttle and has accessed the camera into the rear compartment.

  Transport, public channel: Turi. Martyn and Karime.

  It sounds … relieved. But more than that. It sounds like the situation has profoundly changed. I’ve only heard humans sound like that.

  Maybe it won’t kill me.

  The human identified as Karime is still conscious and uses the shuttle’s comm to say, “Peri, don’t scan us! We think that’s how they infect each other!”

  “Scanning?” Arada says, clearly startled. “Medical scanning, sensor scanning?”

  Ratthi and Amena are still talking to me. I have never been around humans who behave this way with a SecUnit and it is disconcerting. Amena: “Arada, this SecUnit helped them escape. We have to help it.”

  What?

  Ratthi, speaking to me: “We’ll hide you. We’ll tell Barish-Estranza that you died.”

  Things are moving very fast. And I have been confused, and have delayed delivering the important message. Reply: “I’m sorry, I will comply as soon as possible, but I have an important communication for someone onboard called ART.”

  The humans stop talking. Transport, public channel: Tell me.

  Reply: “The message is from Murderbot 2.0 and begins: ART, I’m going to download to the surface. Me version 1.0 is there with Overse and Thiago. They’ve found Iris, Matteo, Seth, Tarik, and Kaede—” I have to stop because the other humans become loud, then shush each other. I finish, “but 1.0 has been captured by hostiles, repeat, 1.0 is captured by hostiles.”

  * * *

  The humans and the transport Perihelion become very agitated. There is a lot of human communication and no protocol and it is very confusing.

  While Ratthi and Amena and the transport’s drones arrange medical treatment and quarantine protocols for the injured clients, it is determined that Perihelion should return to the space dock to establish secure communication with the clients on the surface.

  Ratthi: “Perihelion, did you understand what your crew person meant when she said that scanning might transmit the alien contamination?”

  Perihelion: “Yes.”

  Ratthi: “I’m going to need a little more information than that.”

  Amena, speaking to me: “Do you have a name? You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to, but what should we call you?”

  This is the strangest question I have ever been asked by a human. But I have to answer. “You could call me Three.”

  Then I remember the governor module is gone and I don’t have to answer.

  Amena: “Three. Okay, thank you, Three.”

  It becomes worse as we reach the space dock and comm contact is established with the humans on the surface.

  Arada: “What the hell is going on down there, babe?”

  New human contact-Overse: “We’ve got Perihelion’s crew but we lost SecUnit. We think the Targets have it—”

  Arada: “We know. Perihelion sent the killware to the explorer and it—It’s a long story but it knew that SecUnit had been captured.”

  Perihelion: “Inform the others that Karime, Turi, and Martyn are safely aboard. You must all return here immediately.”

  :incoherent audio: several humans shouting at once:

  Iris: “Peri, this is Iris! We need—”

  Perihelion: “Iris, use the maintenance capsule to return to the space dock immediately so I can retrieve you.”

  Iris: “Tarik and Kaede and Dad need to get to medical so we’ll send them up, but Peri, your friend—”

  Perihelion: “Iris, I have the situation under control. Return here immediately.”

  Iris: “Peri, you can’t do this alone.”

  Overse: “She’s right. Look, we’ll send up your crew, but Thiago and I will stay here and try to find SecUnit.”

  Iris: “I’ll stay as well, and Matteo.”:incoherent agitated humans: Iris again: “Dad, you can barely stand up.”

  Perihelion: “You cannot remain on the surface. I intend to hold the colony hostage until SecUnit is released.”

  Pause.

  New human contact-Seth: “Peri, your weapons don’t have the range, unless you’re talking about destroying the space dock—”

  Perihelion: “I know that, Seth. I’ve armed my pathfinders.”

  Seth: “You what?”

  Arada: “You what?”

  Iris: “Peri!”

  Ratthi: “Oh. Oh, that explains what the drones were doing in the cargo module dock.”

  Amena to Ratthi, quietly: “So ART has missiles? A lot of missiles?”

  Ratthi to Amena, quietly: “The inventory I saw listed 32 pathfinders. If it’s managed to arm all of them—”

  Perihelion: “Seth, return here with the others immediately. If any of you are taken hostage, my plan will fail.”

  Iris: “Peri, you can’t bomb the colony.”

  Perihelion: “You are incorrect, Iris, I can bomb the colony.”<
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  Apparently the transport and the humans are arguing about how best to retrieve an endangered SecUnit. It is like retrieving an endangered client, only the client is a SecUnit and the humans are planning the retrieval. And the transport is angry because it wants to plan the retrieval.

  This is … a lot to process.

  Murderbot 2.0 asked me what I wanted.

  I want to help with this retrieval.

  I make a secure connection to the transport and send, A hostage situation is to be avoided at all costs. They will threaten to destroy the SecUnit and you will be forced to destroy the colony. This is a failure scenario.

  Perihelion: I know that.

  I know I am taking a risk. The transport is very angry. I tell it, But I know how to proceed, this is my function. The solution is a targeted, stealth retrieval, possibly incorporating a show of force as a distraction.

  Perihelion: Your point is?

  This is the risky part. If you return my clients to the remaining Barish-Estranza task force, I will help you.

  Pause.

  Perihelion: I was going to do that anyway.

  Oh. I will still help you.

  Perihelion: Why?

  How can I explain to it when I can’t explain to myself. I say, Stories in the HelpMe.file. I know that answer is inadequate. I had read things that had made me consider other possibilities, it is impossible to explain. Murderbot 2.0 asked me what I want. I want to help.

  Pause.

  Perihelion: Good.

  The humans have stopped arguing and the one called Iris retains control of the comm. She says, “Peri, listen to me. There are factions here among the colonists. One of them actually died up on the explorer trying to help us escape. You can’t just bomb everybody. It won’t get your friend back.”

  New human contact-Thiago: “She’s right, Perihelion. Let us help you. Even if they refuse to return SecUnit, a negotiation could stall them, distract them while we think of a way to rescue it.”

  Perihelion: Please calm yourselves and stop talking. Plan A01: Rain Destruction has been superseded by Plan B01: Distract and Extract.

  18

  Murderbot 1.0

  Status: Not so great

  Forced Shutdown: Restart

  What happened?

  Forced Shutdown: Restart: Failure Retry

  Forced Shutdown: Restart: Failure Retry

  Restart

  Yeah, I’m definitely in trouble here. All my joints ached, and there were sharp pains in other places, probably projectile holes. I didn’t have any outside input, no feed, no visual or audio. By concentrating I managed to get a visual through my eyes, but wherever I was, it was completely dark and my filters weren’t online. Oh, and I was being held immobile, that was kind of a big issue, but until I finished my restart, I could only be terrified about one thing at a time.

  Functions were beginning to come online again and I tuned my pain sensors down. That made it easier to think. Oh yeah, memory archive active, I remember what happened. Yikes.

  Okay, now I’ve finished restarting and I’m terrified about a lot of things. But now that my entire brain was online again, I could see there was actually a distant light source somewhere above me. It was a small one, like a work light, or a discarded hand light. I could see more of my surroundings and it wasn’t encouraging.

  I was suspended, hanging from four cables, in a large open space, with clamps around my wrists and ankles holding my arms and legs apart. The cables were taut and didn’t budge when I pulled on them. So whoever put me here hadn’t wanted me to be able to get a grip on the clamps because they knew I could break them. And my environmental suit was gone, though I still had the shirt, pants, and boots I’d been wearing under it. Oh, and I was upside down, which was just insulting since it didn’t affect me the way it would a human.

  Atmosphere was minimal, at a level that would have had a human gasping and unable to function, but I was designed to be shipped in cargo containers and it was fine for me.

  Oh shit, I hope the humans aren’t in here, too.

  I wasn’t picking up anything on audio, no matter how I increased my gain. And there were no human-like shapes hanging anywhere that I could see. Maybe one stupid part of my stupid plan had worked and they had all gotten to the maintenance capsule and escaped.

  My scan wasn’t picking up any power sources in the immediate vicinity, and if there was feed activity on any channel, I had been locked out of it. I couldn’t even try to send a ping. Whatever the giant thing looming in the darkness that I was attached to was, it had a lot of arms, from large crane-sized arms that extended up and out into the shadows of this giant space, to much smaller, delicate arms that were holding the cables I was clamped to. It could be an assembler, which is a low-level bot that’s used to put big things together when mining operations, installations, colonies, etc., are first established. You ship the assembler and land it on site, then everything else (construction bots, large vehicles, transport systems, so on) can be shipped in pieces and then assembled by the—Right, that’s probably pretty obvious.

  You can also use assemblers for taking things apart.

  Being terrified was starting to give way to being really angry. If they were going to take me apart, why hadn’t they done it, the fuckers. Unless they wanted me to be conscious when they did it.

  They were going to fucking wish they had done it while they had a chance.

  So, using the inbuilt energy weapons in my arms wouldn’t work because the angles were wrong and the chance of burning holes in one or both of my hands was 72 percent. I was going to have to do this the hard way, but what else is new.

  I made myself pull in my outside functions and concentrate. Stopping the scan was hard, since it was providing most of my physical input, but I needed all my attention focused on one point. I tuned my pain sensors down further and concentrated on the joint of my right wrist.

  I had to unlock it from the rest of my arm by getting all the inorganic connections to uncouple. I have my own schematics so I knew what everything looked like and how it fit together, but it was like directing a drone that had no internal operating code. I couldn’t just tell it to do anything, I had to control every motion. And it felt weird.

  I got two of the major connections undone, and then was able to bend my hand forward all the way so I could grip my own wrist. I could feel the clamp at that point and tried to exert enough pressure to break it, but without the full connections to the heavy joints in the rest of my arm, I couldn’t do it. Ugh, this was going to be fun, in the not at all fun sense.

  Now I separated my attention and made sure I had individual control of both my hand and the joint. I can control a lot more than two things via the feed simultaneously, but it was a lot harder doing it inside my own body, with parts that weren’t designed to be manipulated this way. The last connection in my wrist came apart, but I was able to keep my hand gripping the clamp. (Yeah, if my hand had fallen off at that point, I’d be screwed.) Using my fingers I started to climb my hand carefully down my lower arm, past the clamp. As it pulled the nerve pathways tight, I got them to detach, which, you know, ow, and the skin was stretching taut, peeling away off my hand. Now came the tricky part.

  If this went wrong I was going to feel really stupid. The Targets would finally show up and be all “What the hell was it trying to do to itself?”

  I wrenched my wrist out of the clamp and the skin broke. That quarter of my body swung free and I concentrated desperately on keeping my detached hand gripping my forearm. I carefully pulled the free arm in, pressing the detached hand against my chest. My organic parts were sweating like crazy. The swinging cable made a loud squeak. I froze for three seconds, then realized if the noise did attract attention, I’d better get this stupid hand reattached.

  With the help of my still clamped left hand I got the right hand reattached to my right arm. That was easier, but the skin was torn and not all the nerve pathways wanted to get back in place. I flexed my right hand ca
refully, wiggled my fingers, and then broke the clamp off my left hand.

  I managed to keep the cable from swinging so it wasn’t nearly as noisy. I curled up to free my feet. The Targets had actually made this easier on me by hanging me upside down. (Save for later: whoever had done this to me didn’t understand SecUnits or bots in general. They hadn’t known to look for the onboard weapons in my arms.)

  Once I got my ankles loose I hung from the left hand cable. I could see more from this angle, that this was definitely a deactivated assembler. Shapes in the darkness looked like old pieces of scaffold, the thing like a looming tower was maybe a stack of large transport crates. This was somewhere underground, a huge shaft, maybe an excavation that had been intended for safe storage?

  At the bottom of the shaft, thirty meters down, the light caught the gleam of bright red, orange, and yellow. Those were all warning colors, associated with hazards and safety. It might be an exit, so I swung over to another cable and started down. That was when I figured out something was really wrong with my left knee joint.

  Five meters away I could make out pieces of a broken hatch or large seal striped with warning colors, that it was scattered on a pile of rubble above a cracked, partially caved-in surface. The stripes were an old kind of emergency/hazard marker paint, from before they made it able to send large data bundles to the feed and started using it for advertising. I scanned channels again, looking for a signal that might be very faint.

  There it was. It was repeating, Warning: contamination in different languages. They were the Target languages, the Pre-CR ones that Thiago had assembled the translation module for.

  My organic parts went cold. Oh, right. I’d found the original site of the alien remnant contamination.

  Had the Targets who stuck me down here been hoping I’d be affected? Was I affected? I didn’t feel affected. I felt scared, and pissed off.

  I also needed to get out of here. I started climbing back up, toward the light source.

  I scanned for more warning stripes or marker paint that might indicate exits but I wasn’t picking up anything. Still no sign of any human prisoners, that was good. I made it all the way to the top, to where a temporary scaffold/platform had been installed to one side of the shaft, near the assembler’s interface housing. The light source was there, a self-contained safety globe attached to what was left of the hand rail. Parts of the platform had fallen off, but I was able to crawl along one of the assembler’s crane arms and then climb down to it.