Network Effect

by Martha Wells

  I thought I was immune, because I’m a SecUnit. Wow, that sounded pathetic. Like the “I want to be special! How come I’m not?” crap humans pull all the time.

  2.0 said, It can be deleted. ART deleted it.

  Yeah, that was ART. This is just me.

  Me who could be taken over by targetControlSystem at any moment. It would be like having a governor module again.

  No, not again. Never again.

  I had an entry into the Targets’ network. And maybe I had an ally.

  I sent to Central: query: permissions to initiate purge and restart.

  It said, query: client population assistance?

  If I helped its humans, it would help me. I said, acknowledge: If possible. I’ll try.

  It replied: acknowledge: permissions assigned.

  Suddenly I could see the whole node, central and target and how they were intertwined, with TargetContact on the periphery. I accessed central system and initiated the purge.

  That was when TargetControlSystem figured out that I was here.

  It acted much faster than I expected. It used the connection to overwhelm Central, to overwhelm my defenses and flow right into my head. It knew who I was, it had data from its other two iterations, it knew I’d killed it before.

  For a whole second I thought I was done. Either I’d be deleted or under control again with targetControlSystem riding my head like a governor module, and if I had a choice I’d rather be deleted.

  But it hadn’t really caught on to the fact that 2.0 was in here with me. Or I guess, it didn’t understand that we were two different iterations, with different capabilities. I was losing functionality and about to go into involuntary restart. But 2.0 was fine, and it was killware.

  It extracted targetControlSystem from my head and followed the active connection right back into the central system’s partition.

  Central said, purge failed.

  Initiate a shutdown and then destroy the unit, 2.0 told me. Now, for fuck’s sake.

  That will kill you, I told it.

  I know, it said, what do you think my function is, you idiot? Just do it.

  I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. I was an idiot, and I was remembering Miki throwing itself at a combat bot to give me the chance to save its humans.

  If you fuck this up, I am going to be so angry I’ll make ART look nice, 2.0 said. And unlike Miki, this is how I win.

  This was going to hurt. I initiated the shutdown.

  The feed disappeared abruptly as Central went down. Everything was silent, inside and outside my head. I realized I was on the floor again and shoved upright, staggered. I dumped a table over and cut the big crossbar off with my left arm energy weapon. Then I limped over to the star-shaped box that now held 2.0, Central, and targetControlSystem. They’re sleeping, I told myself. 2.0 and Central wouldn’t feel a thing. It was too bad targetControlSystem wouldn’t.

  With my club and both the energy weapons in my arms, I broke the case open and smashed and melted the interior. I felt strange and wrong, and my organic parts were doing things that made me glad again not to have a stomach. I had killed SecUnits and combat bots but this was me, sort of, okay not so sort of, plus Central who was a victim just as much as anybody else. Even TargetContact was a victim. And I was going to have to kill it, too, somehow. With targetControlSystem down, maybe I could get through its protective barrier.

  Finished with Central’s box, I turned to TargetContact.

  Oh, it was moving. This was going to be worse. If there was anything left of the original human in there—

  Then it whipped to its feet and charged me.

  * * *

  SecUnit 03

  Status: Retrieval in Progress

  I circle around the north side of the complex toward a passage between two of the surface structures. Drone intel provides me with a map of the complex, and the location of the Targets concealed in the east side doorways.

  The Targets on the surface dock terrace tell the humans the history of the colony. This is a confirmation of intel already obtained by Iris, but not immediately useful.

  If the humans cannot obtain the intel, I will enter the complex without it. This is the first retrieval I have performed without a governor module and I want it to be successful. I want to find the other SecUnit. I send a status update to Perihelion and it does not reply immediately. Then it sends, Hold position.

  I tell it, I must proceed in order to complete the retrieval.

  It said, SecUnit would be angry if I sacrificed you with no chance of success.

  What?

  Target Two: “They wanted to use the devices in the vault, the old devices. It became worse after that.”

  Thiago: “Who decided to start using the implants?”

  That disturbs the Targets. Target One: “What implants?”

  My drones pick up increased signal activity, deep under the complex, but it is not localized enough to trace.

  On the feed, Thiago sends, Ratthi, your analysis—

  Ratthi sends a file to Perihelion. Its drone creates a display surface and begins to play video of an implant being extracted from a Target.

  The Targets stare at the video.

  Overse: “You see? They didn’t tell you about this, did they?”

  All the other Targets look at Target Four, who says, “It helps the connection. It’s for protection.”

  Target One: “Protection?”

  Target Three: “How many of the others have these? Are you forcing them to obey you?”

  Then Target Two turns back to the humans and says, “Eight levels below the plaza. They would have your friend there. That’s where the contagion is.”

  On the secure feed, Perihelion tells me, I’m pulling the humans out. You are go to proceed.

  I reply on the secure feed, Acknowledged, proceeding.

  On the terrace, Perihelion’s drone says, Run. You have three minutes to clear the area.

  Overse says, “Go, now!” and the humans run along the terrace toward the shuttle.

  The Targets are confused, then turn and run down the path away from the surface dock.

  Another pathfinder slams down in the agricultural field and explodes. Four more arc across the sky making disruptive screaming sounds. This is a distraction so I may initiate Stage 02 of the retrieval.

  The Targets in the east side doorways around the installation’s plaza are disoriented and three run away, headed toward the causeway. I slip inside another doorway without being detected.

  Murderbot 1.0

  My performance reliability dropped but the spike of fear upped my reaction time and I whacked TargetContact across the head with my table part. The impact staggered it back but still didn’t damage the body. The effort I put into the swing made my wrecked knee joint give way and I hit the floor again.

  I needed a bigger weapon. I needed help. I needed to get the fuck out of here.

  The rough floor scraped at my palms as I scrambled toward the hatch. I managed to get upright and climb through the gap before TargetContact got to its feet. If it could catch me, this whole thing could start over, but with me down here instead of poor dead Central. I’d like to opt-out of that.

  I staggered and limp-ran across the hangar bay toward the stupid gravity tube. (I know I said I didn’t want to use it but I didn’t have time to do the stairs and compared to what was behind me it was starting to look friendly. Also, with the feed dead it couldn’t be remotely shut down.) I heard steps behind me and flung myself in.

  I twisted around as the gravity shaft pushed me up. I saw TargetContact less than ten meters behind me. I had to get out before it got to the tube. Two levels went by with me trying to get off the fucking thing without the feed, then I flailed into the unmarked stop zone. It spit me out at the next level and I tumbled into a shadowy corridor and fell on the floor again.

  Ouch. I was beginning to lose control over my pain sensors, a sign of an impending system failure. And I think I’d been too late, I think Ta
rgetContact saw I’d gotten off on this level. I was terrified of an involutary shutdown; when I restarted I’d be targetControlSystem.

  I was higher up in the structure, and had no idea how to get away. It didn’t matter, I had to keep moving. I got up and limp-ran.

  The corridor curved to circle around the hangar bay’s shaft and was way too long. It was cleaner and had more lights, obviously used more recently, and there had to be a lift pod or stairs somewhere.

  Then I picked up a brief contact. Like a ping. A familiar ping. Drones, there were drones down here. Not targetDrones, my kind of drones. I sent frantic pings back, because it wasn’t like TargetContact didn’t know exactly where I was, I could hear it behind me in the corridor.

  Ahead I saw more light and a foyer for a stairwell. I lurched into the foyer just as an armored SecUnit dropped down onto the landing.

  I almost triggered both my energy weapons but just in time I saw the sticker on its helmet. In compressed machine language, somebody had used marker paint to write “ART sent me.” This was 2.0’s SecUnit 3.

  The opaque helmet focused on me. It said, “I’ve never retrieved another SecUnit before. There is no protocol for this.”

  Seriously, fuck protocol. I said, “Hostile incoming. It’s contaminated. Do not scan and don’t let it touch you.” If the contamination worked the way I thought it did I shouldn’t be able to pass it to another SecUnit but who the hell knew. “Don’t scan or connect with me, either, I might be a carrier.”

  SecUnit 3 started to say, “Transport Perihelion was able to obtain that intel from retrieved—” Then it leapt and landed past me, pulled the weapon off its back just as TargetContact rounded the corridor. It fired a burst of explosive bolts and TargetContact reeled back, but the impacts didn’t dent the protective alien remnant coating.

  “It doesn’t work,” I started to yell, but 3 aimed the next burst at the corridor ceiling. The impacts cracked the lighting track and shattered the material holding it in place. As chunks of stone hit the floor, 3 leapt back to me and grabbed me around the waist.

  It said, “Please hold on. I will—”

  “I know!” I yelled and grabbed it around the shoulders. “Just go!”

  It bounded up the stairs, two levels, three levels. (Being carried like this was really uncomfortable, I can see why the humans don’t like it.) 3 called in its drones and the swarm formed a protective cloud around us.

  We came out through a hatchway into daylight, running onto an open plaza, the one I had seen from the surface dock. TargetDrones lay scattered on the paving, dead when targetControlSystem went down. I didn’t see any Targets, but that was probably because a pathfinder sat in the center of the plaza shrieking on comm and audible: Warning: detonation imminent.

  I said, “ART armed the pathfinders? And didn’t tell me?” That asshole.

  “The humans were surprised, too,” 3 said.

  ART’s shuttle dove over the structure’s ribs and dropped into the plaza. The hatch slid open and 3 bounded inside.

  It dumped me in an acceleration chair and I had a view of TargetContact sprinting toward us. Then the hatch slammed shut and Arada was shouting “I’ve got them, go, go!”

  The thrust almost knocked me out of the seat as the shuttle flung itself upward. (ART must be driving.) I was sitting on the safety webbing which was not helpful. 3 did what I would have done with a wounded human, and dropped into the seat next to me and stretched an arm across to hold me in place. From the pilot’s seat, Arada demanded, “SecUnit, are you all right?”

  “Not really,” I said, “I’m infected with contaminated code. 2.0 tagged it as anomalous so ART can delete it. Tell it not to use a medical scanner on me.” Through the port I got a view of the causeway and the dots that were the Targets/Colonists who had been in the structure, running away.

  “We know,” Arada told me, breathless from the acceleration. “The crew who escaped from the explorer knew about the scanning and Perihelion figured out how it was done.”

  Of course it did. This sounded like a good time to let go and have that involuntary shutdown.

  I was fading out when below us, the pathfinder exploded. ART said, TargetContact is offline.

  So was I.

  20

  So I wish I could have stayed shut down through the whole thing and skipped all the painful parts, but no such luck.

  I restarted by the time we reached ART, so I was able to limp out of the shuttle on my own. Which was great, then I collapsed on the deck and had another involuntary shutdown.

  When I restarted again (and I don’t know if I’m underselling it but these rapid performance reliability drops and restarts were not pleasant or fun) I was still on the deck but surrounded by a bunch of unknown humans. One reached for my shoulder and I jerked away and almost restarted again.

  Amena’s voice said, “No, it doesn’t like to be touched!” And I realized these were not actually unknown humans.

  Ratthi and Arada sat on the deck in front of me with Amena hovering in the background. The others gathered around were Kaede, Iris, and Matteo. ART’s humans wore clean clothes and various medical stabilizing packs, and they all smelled a lot better. Two of ART’s big repair drones hovered nearby, and SecUnit 3 stood over to the side. It had taken its armor off, or been told to take its armor off. It wore a set of ART’s crew clothing and looked, if I was reading the body language right and I probably was, like it had absolutely no idea what to do.

  Iris told me, “It’s all right, take it easy.”

  Matteo was saying to Arada, “Kaede’s right, we’ll put together a run box so we can isolate the code—”

  “Then Peri should be able to delete it—” Kaede added.

  “Delete what?” I said.

  “The code in your system,” Ratthi explained, tapping his own forehead like maybe I had also forgotten where my brain was. “The contaminated code. We can’t use the medical platform, until Perihelion gets that code out of you. But Overse and Thiago are getting a portable med unit that will be cut off from the feed. We’re going to take care of your physical injuries right here, then by that point, Perihelion should be able to deal with the contamination.”

  Physical injuries. Oh right, I had been shot a lot and was still leaking. “What’s our situation?”

  “No one’s shooting at us and we aren’t sending armed pathfinders at anyone,” Ratthi told me. “Everyone is back on the ship. And we have some Barish-Estranza personnel to send back to their transport, but we want to make certain they’re free of the remnant contamination first.”

  Matteo asked Ratthi something technical about the biohazard testing and I stopped listening, mostly. From what they were saying, it looked like I/2.0 had been right about how the contamination was spread. So, it’s nice to be right, when you’re leaking and parts of you have fallen off.

  Arada turned to Iris. “I think I should mention … Perihelion told us why you were actually here, in this system.”

  ART’s humans were taken aback. Iris exchanged a low-key version of an “oh shit” look with Kaede. Matteo said hopefully, “Um, you mean the deep space mapping?”

  Were we going to have a problem? I really hope we wouldn’t have a problem. And I wish Arada hadn’t picked a moment when I was literally falling apart to bring this up.

  Arada said, “We’re not corporates. Everything Perihelion told us was in confidence and we won’t betray it, or you.” She made a little gesture. “I know contracts are important in the Corporation Rim, so we could sign one saying that we won’t talk about anything we were told, or what happened here, if that will help.”

  Ratthi looked doubtful. “Yes, but we’ll have to come up with some sort of explanation.”

  Amena added, “Yeah, my second mom is going to want to know what happened and she’s not exactly easy to lie to.”

  “Your second mom?” Kaede prompted.

  “She’s the head of the— She was the head of the Preservation Alliance Council,” Amena explained
. “Dr. Mensah. She was in the newsfeeds a lot in the CR—she was kidnapped by a corporate called GrayCris and rescued by a SecUnit on TranRollinHyfa, and there was a company armed ship that was attacked and another ship from a security corporate that got blown up.”

  “Rescued by a…” Matteo trailed off and they all stared at me.

  Which was not what I needed right now, cut off from the feed and ART’s cameras and my drones. I said, “ART, I thought you told them about me.”

  ART said, I told them I had met a rogue SecUnit. I didn’t imply that you were every SecUnit ever mentioned in the newsfeeds.

  I think I was every SecUnit mentioned in the newsfeeds during that time, but whatever. SecUnit 3 had stopped trying to pretend to be an appliance and was now watching in fascination.

  “No, Peri didn’t…” Kaede exchanged a look with Iris again. “We heard a little about GrayCris going down but we weren’t really following the story…”

  Matteo’s eyebrows tilted. “So the rumor that it was a rogue SecUnit on TranRollinHyfa—”

  “Was true,” Ratthi finished. “I was one of the ‘unidentified conspirators’ who escaped and is to be held liable for ‘massive interference with commerce and property damage’ if I’m ever caught on that station again.” He shrugged. “So now we know things about each other.”

  Iris thought it over, then lifted her hands. “Look, we can work all this out later. Can we agree for now that we’re all allies who keep each other’s confidences?”

  “And we don’t like Barish-Estranza,” Matteo added.

  “Agreed,” Arada said.

  Thiago and Overse are here with the emergency medical kit. Great. I think I’m going to restart again.

  * * *

  I’m not going into detail because it was gross and involved a lot of leaking and removing projectiles and regenerating tissue the hard old-fashioned way with hand units and the emergency medical kit kept trying to spray everything with disinfectant.

  At one point, Martyn, who was Seth’s marital partner and Iris’s second parent, got called in from Medical to consult. He was a bio expert, too, but was still in isolation getting decontaminated himself. “Hello,” he said, peering at us via a display surface ART had generated. “How many SecUnit friends does Peri have?”