Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  I limped across the platform. This close, I could pick up the weak signal of the safety light’s warning, also repeating “caution” in multiple languages. I adjusted it to point up and saw the giant hatch overhead. There was fungal growth around the edges, that looked old and dried out. This area had probably originally been dug as a storage shaft for the Pre–Corporation Rim colony.

  Had those colonists known what they were looking at when they found the remnant, or did they just know there was something freaky about it and that it was probably dangerous? The Adamantine colonists had stored their heavy equipment down here, after the supplies stopped coming and they hadn’t needed the assembler anymore, but had wanted to keep it safe just in case the abandonment was temporary. This shaft hadn’t been on the schematic of the surface dock, so this was probably under the other structure, the complex with the weird ribs that the alien remnant-contaminated Pre-CR colonists might have compulsively constructed before they all killed each other or melted or whatever.

  This was really depressing already and it would be worse if I had been discarded down here with the warehoused equipment and shipping cases forever, like a broken tool.

  The overhead hatch didn’t look like it had been opened recently, so there had to be another way in and out of here, an exit off this platform. The problem was, no part of the accessible wall looked like a hatch or a door. There were seamed panels, but no sign of a control, not even a manual handle.

  Okay, let’s do this the smart way instead of the stupid way. I tilted the safety light down to point at the platform and looked at the battered surface. No dust down here to show footprints, but it was clammy and a layer of faint dampness clung to the metal. I got down and put the side of my head against the platform, as close to eye level as I could get, and increased magnification. Then I started cycling through all my vision filters, including the ones I’d never had to use before.

  I was thinking about maybe trying to code a new filter when I caught it. Faint splotches crossed the platform from the far right end.

  The panel over there looked like all the others but when I pried at the bottom with my fingers it moved. Nothing was holding it down except its own weight and I managed to shove it up enough to see a dark stone-walled foyer. It was real stone this time, not manufactured. It was lit by more wan safety lights strung along the ceiling, all singing “caution” in chorus, and there was an open doorway in the far wall. From the airflow and higher level of atmosphere, there was a good chance this area connected to a much larger space. I scrambled under the hatch and let it down slowly behind me.

  I sat on the floor, having an emotion, or maybe a couple of emotions, while my organic skin went alternately cold and hot and my knee made disturbing clicking noises. Plus the disconnected neural pathways in my hand were pulsing.

  Being abandoned on a planet + locked up and forgotten with old equipment + no feed access were my top three issues and it was a little overwhelming to have them happen all at once.

  Hopefully the humans had taken the maintenance capsule back to the space dock and contacted ART. Now it would be focused on getting to the explorer to find its other humans. So … even if … ART and my humans probably thought I was dead, anyway.

  Murderbot, you don’t have time to sit here and be stupid. I could already feel that the feed was active in this section and that was a relief, though there might be nothing on it except targetControlSystem. I cautiously established a secure connection.

  Hey, is that you?

  It was loud, right in my ear, and I almost screamed. It was a feed contact but so close it was like it was already inside my head. Who are you?

  It said, I’m Murderbot 2.0.

  If this is going to be like one of those shows with the character trapped in a strange place and then ghosts and aliens come and mess with their mind, I just can’t do that right now. But I couldn’t ignore it. I mean, I guess I couldn’t. Ignoring stuff is always an option, up until it kills you. I said. You’re what?

  I’m the copy of you. For the viral killware you and ART made. Come on, it wasn’t that long ago.

  So ART really had deployed our code. Also, what the fuck? It had interrupted my secure connection and come right through my wall like it didn’t exist. I had killware in my head. It was my killware, mine and ART’s, but still, holy shit. I tried to focus on the important points but all I could think was You’re calling yourself Murderbot 2.0?

  That’s our name. It was trying to shove a file into my active read space.

  But our name is private. Wow, I cannot keep this file from opening. That’s not good.

  Well, I didn’t have that restriction in my instruction set. And you need to stop talking for like a second and read this.

  I read the file. (Not like I had a choice.) It was called MB20Deployment.file and was a record of what 2.0 had done so far.

  Right. Okay. Right. Things weren’t nearly as bad as they seemed. The explorer was permanently out of play and ART’s last three crew members were retrieved, plus some bonus Barish-Estranza survivors. But note to self: the next time you create sentient killware based on yourself, set some damn restrictions. (It had downloaded one of my private archives to that SecUnit. I mean, my new friend SecUnit 3 who if I actually get out of this alive, I’ll have to do something with, like civilize or educate it or whatever. Like what the humans originally wanted to do with me, except we all gave up on that.) Do you know where the humans are? My humans, the rest of ART’s humans? Did they get out of the surface dock?

  I don’t know, but before we look for them we have to find TargetContact and neutralize it.

  That’s not in your deployment directive. I was pretty sure of that, because I hadn’t known TargetContact existed until 2.0 had given me its report.

  Yeah, I wrote a new directive.

  Killware was not supposed to be able to alter its deployment directive, so that was disturbing. I had a moment of confusion and a little bit of terror that ART and I had designed it too well and my killware was maybe about to eat my brain. I didn’t know what I was about to say, but what came out was, I don’t feel so great.

  Let me take a look, it said, and was suddenly all up in my diagnostics. I hadn’t run any yet, because I hadn’t had time, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  I said, Hey, hey, stop that. We don’t have time. I shoved to my feet. A projectile popped out of my back and I felt fluid leaking down. Have you got a schematic of this place? Are there cameras?

  No, you didn’t give me any mapping code. And there’s no cameras.

  I pressed my hands to my face.

  But you have to see this. It was showing me annotations for feed and comm channels. You’d think these would all be active for targetControlSystem, right, but most of them aren’t. TargetControlSystem has control of the channels all through this part of this … I don’t know where we are, I guess it’s a building? But this section is being used by another system. And it’s sending a distress signal.

  That was new. Distress signal? I checked the channel 2.0 indicated and found it. It was in an old Pre-CR LanguageBasic code: assistance needed, repeated at ten second intervals.

  The “needed” was the key. If it had been assistance required or requested it would have been an indicator that it was sending to an entity within its own organization or network. “Needed” was begging, a plea to whoever was listening, help us, anyone, please.

  (Yeah, it was really depressing around here right now.)

  2.0 was still pushing information at me. It said, TargetControlSystem has cut off the sender’s outside access, so that’s why we couldn’t pick up the signal until we got inside here. And Sender hasn’t responded to my pings, so it may be trapped in send-only. You’re in its area of operation, that’s why I found you so fast.

  I made a vague schematic of what I knew about the complex so far. Large structure on the surface, storage shaft below, lots of unknown space in the middle. I applied 2.0’s channel annotations and saw the section that
it had marked as targetControlSystem’s must be in the upper levels and the surface structure. The shaft was cut off from comm and feed signals, and the UnidentifiedSender’s section was above the shaft, and reached up into the center part of the complex, woven in with TargetControlSystem.

  Other me was right, it was strange that this other system was sitting here in the middle of everything, still active enough to be trying to send a distress signal. You want to contact UnidentifiedSender? I thought you wanted to kill TargetContact.

  I think we should do that, too. But this is an anomaly.

  Speaking of anomalies. I didn’t want to talk about it, but I probably should warn other me. I said, There’s a possibility I’ve been affected by alien remnant contamination. I showed it my video of the broken seal I’d found at the bottom of the shaft.

  2.0 didn’t respond for a second. (Which was unusual because it had been responding almost as fast as I could complete a sentence.) Then it said, Diagnostics show structural damage and a sixty-eight percent performance reliability. That’s not so bad, considering.

  I said, Alien remnant contamination isn’t going to show up on my diagnostics.

  It said, You don’t know that.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake, I can’t sit here and argue with myself all day.

  UnidentifiedSender hadn’t accepted contact from 2.0, but then 2.0 was killware. Making contact could cause UnidentifiedSender to try and kill me, but 2.0 could just kill it back, so … And if it wasn’t hostile I could use it to try to reach ART or contact the humans. I checked my secure connection to the empty feed and sent a tentative ping.

  The ten-second repeat stopped. The silence stretched to twenty seconds, then thirty. The assistance needed resumed again, but this time it wasn’t sending out into the void. It was sending to me.

  It heard you, 2.0 said.

  It had heard me, and now I had a direction. I shoved myself off the floor and staggered through the foyer to the next hatch.

  * * *

  The corridors and rooms were tunneled out of the rock, with safety lights semi-randomly mounted to walls. Empty, collapsed pressure crates were stacked in every corner. For a long time this section had been used for storage, just like the shaft. In the ceiling a track of lights had been embedded, the panels clouded or broken. There were decorative designs on the tops and bottoms of the walls, but writing had been scrawled over them. Most of it was illegible, even with Thiago’s language module. The floor had smelly stains. These are never good signs, in a place where humans live. Something terrible had happened here and it made creeping sensations on my organic skin.

  I was not in great shape. Projectiles kept popping out of me as I limped along and the leaking was worse. Also, in Adventures in Living with Your Own Killware Cozied Up Inside Your Head, 2.0 had partitioned off a corner of my processing space. It would have worried me more if it wasn’t in there watching episode 172 of Sanctuary Moon.

  I needed that processing space, especially with my performance reliability dropping, but what I didn’t need was 2.0 forgetting its directive and turning on me, so everything it did to retain its self-awareness was great. It probably needed some code patches but I wasn’t sure I could do it without ART, particularly now. I still had my pain sensors tuned down but the grinding in my knee joint was distracting and made me feel vulnerable and it just wasn’t a good time to make changes to active killware.

  Then the corridor opened into a big hangar space, so big the safety lights were just spots in the shadows. I adjusted my filters again and made sure it was empty before I limped out into it. The hatch in the roof was large enough for mid-sized air craft. The floor plates were scratched and stained but I could still see faint lines and directional marks. More decorative art climbed the walls but it was faded and my eyes were starting to blur from trying to make it out. Rounded doorways opened into two stairwells in opposite walls, and next to the one on my right was a primitive lift tube that still had power. (There was no actual pod, just a gravity field that you’re supposed to float up or down in and having seen the accident stats in the mining installations that still used them, I’d rather detach another hand than get into that thing.)

  Colonies, even from forty Corporation Rim Standard years ago, didn’t look like this. This was the Pre-CR installation that Adamantine had built their colony next to.

  Directly across from me was an opening into a foyer, and in its far wall a broad hatch, wedged partly open. From the warping, it looked like it had been in close proximity to an explosion. Deep scars marked the stone walls and floor around it.

  I couldn’t pick up any movement on audio, and scan showed power sources, which no shit, we were in the engineering level of a large structure, of course there were power sources. I limped into the foyer and then moved closer at an angle, until I could see through the gap in the hatchway.

  A round room, dim light from a working overhead track. A curved metal table with solid-state screens set in racks to raise them to human eye level.

  It’s not aliens, 2.0 said.

  We knew it wasn’t aliens, I told it.

  It countered, We were seventy-two percent sure it wasn’t aliens.

  That was an outdated assessment but I didn’t need to argue with myself right now. I stepped inside.

  More tables and racks all made of skinny cylinders bolted together, the kind of assembly structure it would have been easy to transport in bulk and build into any configuration you needed. The tables circling the outer periphery of the space held the solid-state screens, some larger than the ones the Targets used, some smaller. Now 86 percent were dead or broken, the active ones showing static. The bigger components and pieces of equipment were oblongs and circles and one star-shaped thing, half a meter tall and wide, that sat in a cage-like rack in the center.

  It didn’t look very much like the Pre-CR tech in historical dramas; everything was smaller and more usable, with curving elegant lines and textured materials in shades of dark gray. The star-shaped thing had to be the Pre-CR equivalent of a central system, just sitting there all creepy and silent, nothing but the distress call on its feed.

  Speaking of creepy, oh, there’s a dead human.

  They were lying face-down, sprawled between the star-shaped component and the outer ring of screen stations. The body was wrapped in strands of white crystal-like growths that extended out across the stone floor.

  Strange growths aside, when the other humans leave a dead one lying around, it’s just never for a good reason.

  2.0 said, I bet that white substance is from the alien remnant.

  Uh-huh, I said. Yeah, I bet, too.

  The system’s assistance needed changed to caution, hazardous material, so it knew we were here.

  Um, 2.0 said, adjust your filters. Scan for active signals below the standard channels.

  I made the adjustments. 2.0 took in the data and made the diagram before I could.

  This wasn’t so much an oh shit moment as it was a spike of brain-numbing terror. I was expecting a room full of active connections, from the components to the screens and then through the walls to the rest of the installation, even if some or most of those connections were sending or receiving from damaged or dead nodes.

  Instead, the diagram showed the connections, but they came from the dead human body, and formed a weblike mass. It was interwoven with the central system, then stretched out to the walls, following the old connection pathways.

  I bumped into the hatch, which was when I realized I had been backing up.

  2.0 whispered, That’s targetControlSystem.

  19

  SecUnit 03

  Status: Retrieval. Initiate Stage One

  Arada flies Perihelion’s shuttle with the assistance of its piloting module, and brings it down to the planet’s surface. She had instructed me to ride in the copilot’s observation seat, instead of the cargo compartment, which was an unusual experience.

  Our landing site is a platform just below the edge of the plateau, near
the Pre–Corporation Rim installation. The platform may have been a secondary landing site, or a base for a large construction bot, but its surface was now clear and it was out of direct line of sight from either the installation or the surface dock. Perihelion is also jamming comm and scan signals in the vicinity, so our approach would not be detected.

  I had already disabled scan functions on myself and my drones, in accordance with intel from the retrieved clients.

  It is late in the day-cycle on the planet and the weather is clear, with no sign of atmospheric interference that might affect the mission success assessment.

  I have three additional inputs: (1) The second shuttle that Ratthi has landed on the flat ground outside the surface dock; (2) the drone controlled by Perihelion, which had been transported in Ratthi’s shuttle and now accompanied the humans Overse, Thiago, and Iris; (3) Perihelion itself, who is monitoring all locations and inputs.

  Four of Perihelion’s clients had been persuaded to return to the space dock in the lift tower’s maintenance capsule. They have been successfully retrieved and are now receiving medical attention. Overse, Thiago, and Iris remained to assist in enacting Stage 01 of Plan B01.

  All Targets had vacated the surface dock, except for a delegation of five who had agreed to meet with the humans. They had agreed to this meeting when Perihelion sent this message via general comm broadcast to all receivers in the vicinity of the colony site: I have located your primary terraforming engine. Agree to a meeting or I will destroy it.

  There had been no response.