Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  Second message: You require proof of intent.

  And then Perihelion had crashed and detonated an armed pathfinder into the center of the agricultural zone between the space dock and the Pre-CR installation. The crater was large. The second pathfinder had been detonated in the air above the Pre-CR complex.

  The Targets had agreed to the meeting.

  Before we boarded our shuttle, Arada told me, “You don’t have to do this. I know facing these people, after what they did to your—the other two SecUnits. It can’t be easy. And I don’t feel right asking you to do this so soon after you hacked your governor module. This must be a confusing time for you.”

  It is confusing. But following protocol and assisting in a retrieval are familiar. I told her, “I want to do this.”

  She nodded. “Thank you. If you can get SecUnit back—well, a lot of people will be very grateful.”

  I had read the HelpMe.file and accepted it as truthful. But there was a difference between accepting data as accurate and experiencing it. The humans would not abandon this SecUnit even though part of our function was to be disposable if necessary.

  There is a lot about what is going on here that I don’t understand. But I am participating anyway.

  I check our secure feed and comm connections, and then signal to Arada to open the hatch. The intel drones I had attached to the back of my armor peel off and exit the shuttle in a cloud. They spread out, shift into stealth mode, and deploy toward the installation. They are using a code to project the same type of interference emitted by the Targets’ protective gear. They will not be able to detect the targetDrones, but they will not be detected, either. I am projecting the same code, so hopefully the targetDrones will not detect me, but this is untested and it is better to avoid them altogether.

  Outside the surface dock, on the wide terrace of the east side entrance, Perihelion’s drone sends video to our secure feed of the five Targets arriving to meet Overse, Thiago, and Iris.

  Oh, there is also an armed pathfinder on the terrace.

  The Targets are not armed, and are dressed in work clothing and not the more familiar protective suits they use for combat. Two of the Targets exhibit the gray skin on face, hands, and other exposed areas and the other three have blotches of gray on human-normal ranges of skin tones.

  On the feed, Ratthi says, Oh, I hope this works.

  Hush, Arada says, don’t distract them.

  Overse taps her feed in acknowledgment.

  The first Target (designated Target One) says, “You can’t detonate the device while you’re here, why threaten us with it?”

  Perihelion is feeding the translation to the feed. The language had been identified as the same one used on the space dock’s signage. That’s the Adamantine colony’s language, Iris confirms on the feed. I think this is the same faction as the colonist who helped us on the explorer.

  Thiago tells the Targets, “It’s a threat to us, too. The transport is forcing us to meet with you on its behalf.”

  (During the initial planning stage aboard Perihelion, Ratthi had voiced an objection: “Are we sure they’re going to buy this? That we’re prisoners of an evil transport who is forcing us to do this?”

  Perihelion: I can be very convincing.)

  Target One says, doubtfully, “The transport?”

  Thiago: “You attacked it, tried to upload a foreign system to it, and took away some of the humans aboard.”

  Target Two: “That was the infected group. We aren’t responsible for their actions.”

  Thiago: “That may be, but the transport holds all of you responsible. If we knew more about your situation, perhaps it would relent.”

  Target Three, sarcastically: “If the ship speaks, why didn’t it come in person?”

  Perihelion’s drone: You don’t want to meet me in person.

  The Targets react with astonishment and some dismay.

  Target Two: “What happened to those who boarded the transport?”

  Thiago looks at Overse, who says, “They’re all dead.”

  (Thiago and Overse had decided earlier that Overse will be the “bad one” who agrees with the evil transport’s desire to destroy the colony.)

  My drones reach the open plaza of the installation, and slip down past the rib structures. I send to our secured feed, Intel incoming. The drones detect seven armed Targets, concealed just inside the two entrances into the structure on the eastern side. The other two entrances appear to be clear. Perihelion taps the feed in acknowledgment.

  Target Two: “What do you want from us?”

  Thiago: “We want you to return the person who you captured in the drop box embarkation chamber. Return that person and we will leave you in peace.” On the secure feed, he says, I have to try, maybe it will be just this easy.

  Overse replies, Oh, Thiago.

  Iris adds, It’s never easy.

  They are correct. Hostages are never taken simply to be released on demand.

  Target One: “We can’t return that person, we didn’t take them. That was the infected group.”

  Overse: “Then tell them to return that person, or there will be more detonations.”

  Target Two: “They won’t listen to us.”

  Overse jerks her head toward the pathfinder. “Make them listen. None of us has a choice.”

  Thiago: “If you can tell us where they are keeping our friend, that may convince the transport to wait.”

  The drones manage to make stealth entries into the two clear doorways on the western side of the plaza. I report this to Perihelion, who taps my feed again. It sends to the humans: Continue to stall.

  The Targets continue to exhibit agitated behavior.

  Iris: “Tell us what happened here, maybe that will help. We know you found alien remnants. You put one on the transport’s drive, and on the explorer.”

  Target Two: “We didn’t know they did that.”

  Target Four, speaking for the first time: “You could be lying. You want our findings.”

  Overse: “Was the explosion in your agricultural zone a lie?”

  Target One nudges Target Four to step back. “It affects some more than others. We are not all to blame for the actions of a few.”

  Iris: “But the few killed most of the crew of the explorer, and they were going to forcibly contaminate us. We were coming to help you. Why should we believe you?”

  Overse: “You need to do something besides just repeating that it’s not your fault. Tell us where they’re keeping our friend.”

  The drones scout darkened corridors now and I am mainly receiving low resolution visuals. A feed is active but no SecUnit activity has been detected yet. One drone has located an open antigrav shaft and is proceeding down it. I direct a squad to follow it. There are many levels to search. The installation is much larger underground than we had anticipated.

  Target Five, suddenly: “Why do you want to know that? You can’t free them.”

  Careful, Ratthi warned on the feed. We don’t want them to wonder why you’re asking that question.

  Perihelion’s drone: Do I need to demonstrate proof of intent again? How vital is the body of water to your agricultural system?

  Targets are agitated again.

  Thiago: “You see? If you could tell us where our friend is, perhaps we can make the transport understand this isn’t your fault.”

  I receive drone scouting data. I tell Perihelion: Familiar signal activity detected, but drones cannot make contact or establish location. I add, I need to be closer to help the drones determine location. I have to get down there.

  Perihelion acknowledges, Initiate phase 2.

  Arada has been listening on her feed, and now nods to me. “Good luck,” she says.

  I reply, “Thank you.” I climb out of the shuttle, and make certain Arada locks the hatch behind me. Then I start up the rocks to begin a stealth approach of the installation and its central plaza.

  * * *

  Murderbot 1.0

  So,
we had found targetControlSystem. Sweat was sticking my shirt to what was left of my back and my performance reliability had dropped another three percent.

  The Adamantine colonists must have found the Pre-CR system down here, and maybe repaired it, as a backup to their own systems. Then one day something had happened in the shaft they were using for storage and a piece of heavy equipment had hit the seal in the bottom hard enough to break it. A human had gone down there to check it out, and been contaminated by the alien remnant. The human had come up here, or been driven up here by the kind of compulsion Thiago had talked about, and had brought the contamination into this room where it had taken control of the Pre-CR central system.

  We’d assumed the Targets were affected colonists who had built or taken over the targetControlSystem to help them. But it was the other way around.

  Then Central said, query: identify?

  I hadn’t thought there was enough of it left in there to communicate. I replied, acknowledge: security unit(s).

  Central said, query: assistance?

  I said, acknowledge: in progress. I had a bad feeling “assistance” would involve shutting it down permanently but until that point, there was no reason to be mean to it.

  2.0 said, So it transferred the contamination, or infection, whatever to the humans through their feed interfaces.

  Probably. It would have gotten to the augmented humans who had their interfaces built into their brains, then used them to infect the humans with external removable interfaces. It hadn’t always been 100 percent effective, which was why a Target aboard the explorer had helped Iris and the others escape, had told them that not all the Targets believed in the alien hive mind or whatever other crap targetControlSystem had told them.

  2.0 added, We were right about the implants, they were just receivers, old Pre-CR tech. And the remnant tech, the thing it put on ART’s drive and tried to install on the explorer. TargetControlSystem told the colonists what to do with them, and it wrote the code for the targetDrones and the protective gear and the sensor deflection.

  The whole plateau was probably a remnant site, maybe even a ruin, with who knew what under that seal in the shaft. Holy shit, they were growing their food in it.

  2.0 hesitated, suddenly appalled. If the contamination is transmitted through code, do you think ART’s still infected?

  No. Because targetControlSystem got angry and deleted ART’s current version. ART must have been infected when it made the copy, but when it restarted the first thing it did was purge the processing space targetControlSystem was using. It deleted every part of targetControlSystem, treating it like killware, and it must have deleted the infected … code, or whatever it was. An alien code, in a form that didn’t make sense. Well, sort of sense. It must be using the same principle as the machine-readable code written into human DNA that was how things like augments worked, and constructs, and you could transfer malware that way if you weren’t filtering for it … Oh, shit. ART got the infection from an augmented human, like this system did. The Targets sent an infected human carrier aboard—

  Two humans! 2.0 corrected. Ras and Eletra.

  It was right. And they said they were injured, and ART put them on the medical platform and read the contaminated code into itself. TargetControlSystem deleted their memory of it through the implants, and maybe the contamination—

  No, no, 2.0 said. They didn’t use them to transfer the contaminaton. I bet the Targets used them to transfer targetControlSystem to ART. That’s why Eletra’s memories were so messed up, it was using her neural tissue as storage space for its kernel. It added, It’s kind of like killware. That’s why we keep running into it. It’s replicating.

  I stared at Central’s system box. Conclusions:

  1)  The alien remnant had forced a contaminated human to bring it within range of the nearest operating system, a pre-CR central system.

  2)  The infected central system had partitioned itself (compulsively? Like the humans in alien contamination incidents who built weird things and killed each other?) and created targetControlSystem, a malware-like system that was a hybrid of outdated Pre-CR tech and whatever the alien remnant was.

  3)  TargetControlSystem had spread to the Adamantine systems and colonists. It made them use the Pre-CR tech, because that’s what the Pre-CR central system understood. It had them build what it wanted out of the Pre-CR tech, like the drones, and the implants. Pre-CR tech using alien code.

  4)  But it was still stuck here in the colony, on the terraformed section of the planet. Then the Barish-Estranza contact group had arrived.

  I’d been in the shaft with the unsealed remnant and I was in this room. I still didn’t feel infected. But then, targetControlSystem hadn’t tried to infect the SecUnits on the explorer, either, including Three, who according to 2.0 had been ordered to stand frozen and helpless in the corridor. Maybe it couldn’t affect constructs. That would be nice.

  2.0 said, So who’s targetContact?

  Right, the contact that had been in communication with the explorer’s instance of targetControlSystem. 2.0 had thought it was a human, or at least, not an alien. 2.0 had followed that contact’s connection to this installation, and ended up in Pre-CR Central’s network …

  Oh, I had a bad feeling.

  I stepped forward slowly, circling the web of connections. The only sound was my bad knee grinding and the despairing repeat of the distress signal. 2.0 said, Uh, where are we going?

  I have to check something. I angled around to a break between two tables where there was a void in the connections. I eased forward and managed to fall/crouch down on the floor near the sprawled body of the human.

  The thing is, I had realized there was no odor of decomp. The death had to have happened at least months ago, if not more than a planetary year, or years, if it was the incident that had kicked off the major contamination spread. But the shape of the body I could see under the white growth didn’t look all sunken and gross or dried out.

  The white crystalline substance was grainy, and it grew out of the human’s ears and mouth. I had to edge forward at an angle and then lower my head down to get a view of the human’s face. The skin had blue-white blotchy patches standing out against the light tan. That might be decay, and it might be the same process that had changed the Targets’ skin color and texture. I saw the eyes were blue. And they were looking at me.

  I scrambled away from it, out of the circle of racks and tables. I couldn’t get up because of my knee and I was afraid to turn my back on it to use the wall to climb to my feet.

  2.0 said, I know violence isn’t the solution to everything, but in this case …

  In this case, yeah.

  I pointed my right arm energy weapon at the human’s head, upped the intensity as far as it would go, and fired.

  The white material flashed and emitted a faint odor I couldn’t identify. The human still looked at me, expressionless. Their eyes were crusted with dried fluid, unable to blink. Oh, why can’t anything be easy, just this once?

  I tried to kill it three times. Until 2.0 said, Those scars and marks on the floor around it could be projectile and energy weapon impacts. Somebody else has tried to kill it, multiple times, from different directions and with different weapons.

  Great. Tried to kill it, and tried to blow up the entrance to this chamber, but had been stopped before they could use an explosive big enough. The contamination must have done something to the human host’s organic tissue, a self-protection function.

  I was reluctant to go over there and put my fist through its head because (a) I thought I was immune to code contamination but maybe not if I actually got remnant on my organic parts and (b) if energy weapons wouldn’t work, punching probably wouldn’t, either. I needed to be smart about this.

  I made myself turn around and use the wall to drag myself up so I could stand. There are tools in the shaft. We need to find something that can smash it, or a bigger explosive. I know, I can barely stand and walk, so
this was me being really optimistic right now.

  2.0 said, Uh, potential problem. Why hasn’t targetControlSystem called for help? There has to be proximity detection of some kind. Plus, targetContact there can see us.

  Oh. That was a good question.

  Central said suddenly, query: client population deceased? Y/N.

  It was asking about the humans. I told it acknowledge: No. Client population endangered.

  It said, query: client population assistance?

  I didn’t have the right code and I didn’t want to lie to it. Everything was so much worse even than it looked. I said, acknowledge: unknown.

  It didn’t respond.

  I said, query: proximity alert in progress? It was aware of its situation, it might be able to tell if targetControlSystem knew we were here.

  It said, acknowledge: No alert. No proximity alert. No unknown organism present. In network only.

  Uh. It was saying the targetControlSystem wasn’t reacting to me because it read my presence as non-hostile. It thought I was a Target, an infected colonist.

  I couldn’t respond. SecUnits aren’t supposed to be able to go into shock like humans but my performance reliability had dropped another 5 percent, which is kind of a lot all at once.

  I’m not in network, I told the central system. I’m not infected.

  2.0 said, Uh. I think maybe you are. I read diagnostic anomalies. Hold on.

  Central System sent me an image, a connection map of the room, like the one 2.0 had made. My hard address was on it, and a connection to targetControlSystem.

  Oh, no.

  Human to machine. Maybe that was the way it had to work. Human to machine to human.

  We’d been doing it wrong. I’d been trying to get ART to avoid contact with potentially infected systems, when it was infected augmented humans we had to worry about.

  And I had scanned this room, the infected human. It had been hoping to contaminate me in the shaft, and I had wandered in here and helpfully done it myself.

  2.0 said, I found anomalous code in your active processing space, I’m isolating it and tagging it. I’ve tried deleting it. Oh, it’s out of isolation again. At least I’ve got it tagged.