All Systems Red

by Martha Wells

  Neither unit was dead. But they were incapable of reaching their cubicles in the ready room, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them a hand.

  Three of my drones were down, too; they had gone into combat mode and slammed in ahead of me to draw fire. One had gotten hit by a stray energy burst and was wandering around in the corridor behind me. I checked my two perimeter drones by habit, and opened my comm to Dr. Mensah to tell her I still needed to clear the rest of the habitat and do the formal check for survivors.

  The drone behind me went out with a fizzle that I heard and saw on the feed. I think I realized immediately what that meant but there may have been a half second or so of delay. But I was on my feet when something hit me so hard I was suddenly on my back on the floor, systems failing.

  * * *

  I came back online to no vision, no hearing, no ability to move. I couldn’t reach the feed or the comm. Not good, Murderbot, not good.

  I suddenly got some weird flashes of sensation, all from my organic parts. Air on my face, my arms, through rips in my suit. On the burning wound in my shoulder. Someone had taken off my helmet and the upper part of my armor. The sensations were only for seconds at a time. It was confusing and I wanted to scream. Maybe this was how murderbots died. You lose function, go offline, but parts of you keep working, organic pieces kept alive by the fading energy in your power cells.

  Then I knew someone was moving me, and I really wanted to scream.

  I fought back panic, and got a few more flashes of sensation. I wasn’t dead. I was in a lot of trouble.

  I waited to get some kind of function back, frantic, disoriented, terrified, wondering why they hadn’t blown a hole in my chest. Sound came first, and I knew something leaned over me. Faint noises from the joints told me it was a SecUnit. But there’d only been three. I’d checked the DeltFall specs before we left. I do a half-assed job sometimes, okay, most of the time, but Pin-Lee had checked, too, and she was thorough.

  Then my organic parts started to sting, the numbness wearing off. I was designed to work with both organic and machine parts, to balance that sensory input. Without the balance, I felt like a balloon floating in mid-air. But the organic part of my chest was in contact with a hard surface, and that abruptly brought my position into focus. I was lying face down, one arm dangling. They’d put me on a table?

  This was definitely not good.

  Pressure on my back, then on my head. The rest of me was coming back but slowly, slowly. I felt for the feed but couldn’t reach it. Then something stabbed me in the back of the neck.

  That’s organic material and with the rest of me down there was nothing to control input from my nervous system. It felt like they were sawing my head off.

  A shock went through me and suddenly the rest of me was back online. I popped the joint on my left arm so I could move it in a way not usually compatible with a human, augmented human, or murderbot body. I reached up to the pressure and pain on my neck, and grabbed an armored wrist. I twisted my whole body and took us both off the table.

  We hit the floor and I clamped my legs around the other SecUnit as we rolled. It tried to trigger the weapons built into its forearm but my reaction speed was off the chart and I clamped a hand over the port so it couldn’t open fully. My vision was back and I could see its opaqued helmet inches away. My armor had been removed down to my waist, and that just made me more angry.

  I shoved its hand up under its chin and took the pressure off its weapon. It had a split second to try to abort that fire command and it failed. The energy burst went through my hand and the join between its helmet and neck piece. Its head jerked and its body started to spasm. I let go of it long enough to kneel up, get my intact arm around its neck, and twist.

  I let go as I felt the connections, mechanical and organic, snap.

  I looked up and another SecUnit was in the doorway, lifting a large projectile weapon.

  How many of these damn things were here? It didn’t matter, because I tried to shove myself upright but I couldn’t react fast enough. Then it jerked, dropped the weapon, and fell forward. I saw two things: the ten-centimeter hole in its back and Mensah standing behind it, holding something that looked a lot like the sonic mining drill from our hopper.

  “Dr. Mensah,” I said, “this is a violation of security priority and I am contractually obligated to record this for report to the company—” It was in the buffer and the rest of my brain was empty.

  She ignored me, talking to Pin-Lee on the comm, and strode forward to grab my arm and pull. I was too heavy for her so I shoved upright so she wouldn’t hurt herself. It was starting to occur to me that Dr. Mensah might actually be an intrepid galactic explorer, even if she didn’t look like the ones on the entertainment feed.

  She kept pulling on me so I kept moving. Something was wrong with one of my hip joints. Oh, right, I got shot there. Blood ran down my torn suit skin and I reached up to my neck. I expected to feel a gaping hole, but there was something stuck there. “Dr. Mensah, there might be more rogue units, we don’t know—”

  “That’s why we need to hurry,” she said, dragging me along. She had brought the last two drones with her from outside, but they were uselessly circling her head. Humans don’t have enough access to the feed to control them and do other things, like walk and talk. I tried to reach them but I still couldn’t get a clear link to the hopper’s feed.

  We turned into another corridor and Overse waited in the outer hatch. She hit the open panel as soon as she saw us. She had her handweapon out and I had time to notice that Mensah had my weapon under her other arm. “Dr. Mensah, I need my weapon.”

  “You’re missing a hand and part of your shoulder,” she snapped. Overse grabbed a handful of my suit skin and helped pull me out of the hatch. Dust swirled in the air as the hopper set down two meters away, barely clearing the habitat’s extendable roof.

  “Yeah, I know, but—” The hatch opened and Ratthi ducked out, grabbed the collar of my suit skin, and pulled all three of us up into the cabin.

  I collapsed on the deck as we lifted off. I needed to do something about the hip joint. I tried to check the scan to make sure nobody was on the ground shooting at us but even here my connection to the hopper’s system was twitchy, glitching so much I couldn’t see any reports from the instrumentation, like something was blocking the . . .

  Uh-oh.

  I felt the back of my neck again. The larger part of the obstruction was gone, but I could feel something in the port now. My data port.

  The DeltFall SecUnits hadn’t been rogues, they had been inserted with combat override modules. The modules allow personal control over a SecUnit, turn it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet. The feed would be cut off, control would be over the comm, but functionality would depend on how complex the orders were. “Kill the humans” isn’t a complex order.

  Mensah stood over me, Ratthi leaned across a seat to look out toward the DeltFall camp, Overse popped open one of the storage lockers. They were talking, but I couldn’t catch it. I sat up and said, “Mensah, you need to shut me down now.”

  “What?” She looked down at me. “We’re getting—emergency repair—”

  Sound was breaking up. It was the download flooding my system, and my organic parts weren’t used to processing that much information. “The unknown SecUnit inserted a data carrier, a combat-override module. It’s downloading instructions into me and will override my system. This is why the two DeltFall units turned rogue. You have to stop me.” I don’t know why I was dancing around the word. Maybe because I thought she didn’t want to hear it. She’d just shot a heavily armed SecUnit with a mining drill to get me back; presumably she wanted to keep me. “You have to kill me.”

  It took forever for them to realize what I’d said, put it together with what they must have seen on my field camera feed, but my ability to measure time was glitching, too.

  “No,” Ratthi said, looking down at me, horrified. “No, we can’t—”


  Mensah said, “We won’t. Pin-Lee—”

  Overse dropped the repair kit and climbed over two rows of seats, yelling for Pin-Lee. I knew she was going to the cockpit to take the controls so Pin-Lee could work on me. I knew she wouldn’t have time to fix me. I knew I could kill everyone on the hopper, even with a blown hip joint and one working arm.

  So I grabbed the handweapon lying on the seat, turned it toward my chest, and pulled the trigger.

  PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 10% AND DROPPINGSHUTDOWN INITIATED

  Chapter Five

  I CAME BACK ONLINE to find I was inert, but slowly cycling into a wake-up phase. I was agitated, my levels were all off, and I had no idea why. I played back my personal log. Oh, right.

  I shouldn’t be waking up. I hoped they hadn’t been stupid about it, too soft-hearted to kill me.

  You notice I didn’t point the weapon at my head. I didn’t want to kill myself, but it was going to have to be done. I could have incapacitated myself some other way, but let’s face it, I didn’t want to sit around and listen to the part where they convinced each other that there was no other choice.

  A diagnostic initiated and informed me the combat override module had been removed. For a second I didn’t believe it. I opened my security feed and found a camera for Medical. I was lying on the procedure table, my armor gone, just wearing what was left of my suit skin, the humans gathered around. That was a bit of a nightmare image. But my shoulder, hand, and hip had been repaired, so I’d been in my cubicle at some point. I ran the recording back a little and watched Pin-Lee and Overse use the surgical suite to deftly remove the combat module from the back of my head. It was such a relief, I played the recording twice, then ran a diagnostic. My logs were clear; nothing there except what I’d had before entering the DeltFall habitat.

  My clients are the best clients.

  Then hearing came online.

  “I’ve had HubSystem immobilize it,” Gurathin said.

  Huh. Well, that explained a lot. I still had control of SecSystem and I told it to freeze HubSystem’s access to its feed and implement my emergency routine. This was a function I’d built in that would substitute an hour or so of ambient habitat noise in place of the visual and audio recordings HubSystem made. To anyone listening to us through HubSystem, or trying to play back the recording, it would just sound like everybody had abruptly stopped talking.

  What Gurathin had said had evidently been a surprise, because voices protested, Ratthi, Volescu, and Arada mostly. Pin-Lee was saying impatiently, “There’s no danger. When it shot itself, it froze the download. I was able to remove the few fragments of rogue code that had been copied over.”

  Overse began, “Do you want to do your own diagnostic, because—”

  I could hear them in the room and on the security feed, so I switched to just visual on the camera. Mensah had held up a hand for quiet. She said, “Gurathin, what’s wrong?”

  Gurathin said, “With it offline, I was able to use HubSystem to get some access to its internal system and log. I wanted to explore some anomalies I’d noticed through the feed.” He gestured to me. “This unit was already a rogue. It has a hacked governor module.”

  On the entertainment feed, this is what they call an “oh shit” moment.

  Through the security cams, I watched them be confused, but not alarmed, not yet.

  Pin-Lee, who had apparently just been digging around in my local system, folded her arms. Her expression was sharp and skeptical. “I find that difficult to believe.” She didn’t add “you asshole” but it was in her voice. She didn’t like anybody questioning her expertise.

  “It doesn’t have to follow our commands; there is no control over its behavior,” Gurathin said, getting impatient. He didn’t like anybody questioning his expertise either, but he didn’t show it like Pin-Lee did. “I showed Volescu my evaluations and he agrees with me.”

  I had a moment to feel betrayed, which was stupid. Volescu was my client, and I’d saved his life because that was my job, not because I liked him. But then Volescu said, “I don’t agree with you.”

  “The governor module is working, then?” Mensah asked, frowning at all of them.

  “No, it’s definitely hacked,” Volescu explained. When he wasn’t being attacked by giant fauna, he was a pretty calm guy. “The governor’s connection to the rest of the SecUnit’s system is partially severed. It can transmit commands, but can’t enforce them or control behavior or apply punishment. But I think the fact that the Unit has been acting to preserve our lives, to take care of us, while it was a free agent, gives us even more reason to trust it.”

  Okay, so I did like him.

  Gurathin insisted, “We’ve been sabotaged since we got here. The missing hazard report, the missing map sections. The SecUnit must be part of that. It’s acting for the company, they don’t want this planet surveyed for whatever reason. This is what must have happened to DeltFall.”

  Ratthi had been waiting for a moment to lunge in and interrupt. “Something odd is definitely going on. There were only three SecUnits for DeltFall in their specs, but there were five units in their habitat. Someone is sabotaging us, but I don’t think our SecUnit is part of it.”

  With finality, Bharadwaj said, “Volescu and Ratthi are right. If the company did order the SecUnit to kill us, we would all be dead.”

  Overse sounded mad. “It told us about the combat module, it told us to kill it. Why the hell would it do that if it wanted to hurt us?”

  I liked her, too. And even though being part of this conversation was the last thing I wanted to do, it was time to speak for myself.

  I kept my eyes closed, watching them through the security camera, because that was easier. I made myself say, “The company isn’t trying to kill you.”

  That startled them. Gurathin started to speak, and Pin-Lee shushed him. Mensah stepped forward, watching me with a worried expression. She was standing near me, with Gurathin and the others gathered in a loose circle around her. Bharadwaj was farthest back, sitting in a chair. Mensah said, “SecUnit, how do you know that?”

  Even through the camera, this was hard. I tried to pretend I was back in my cubicle. “Because if the company wanted to sabotage you, they would have poisoned your supplies using the recycling systems. The company is more likely to kill you by accident.”

  There was a moment while they all thought about how easy it would have been for the company to sabotage its own environmental settings. Ratthi began, “But surely that would—”

  Gurathin’s expression was stiffer than usual. “This Unit has killed people before, people it was charged with protecting. It killed fifty-seven members of a mining operation.”

  What I told you before, about how I hacked my governor module but didn’t become a mass murderer? That was only sort of true. I was already a mass murderer.

  I didn’t want to explain. I had to explain. I said, “I did not hack my governor module to kill my clients. My governor module malfunctioned because the stupid company only buys the cheapest possible components. It malfunctioned and I lost control of my systems and I killed them. The company retrieved me and installed a new governor module. I hacked it so it wouldn’t happen again.”

  I think that’s what happened. The only thing I know for certain is that it didn’t happen after I hacked the module. And it makes a better story that way. I watch enough serials to know how a story like that should go.

  Volescu looked sad. He shrugged a little. “My viewing of the Unit’s personal log that Gurathin obtained confirms that.”

  Gurathin turned to him, impatient. “The log confirms it because that’s what the Unit believes happened.”

  Bharadwaj sighed. “Yet here I sit, alive.”

  The silence was worse this time. On the feed I saw Pin-Lee move uncertainly, glance at Overse and Arada. Ratthi rubbed his face. Then Mensah said quietly, “SecUnit, do you have a name?”

  I wasn’t sure what she wanted. “No.”

  “It calls
itself ‘Murderbot,’” Gurathin said.

  I opened my eyes and looked at him; I couldn’t stop myself. From their expressions I knew everything I felt was showing on my face, and I hate that. I grated out, “That was private.”

  The silence was longer this time.

  Then Volescu said, “Gurathin, you wanted to know how it spends its time. That was what you were originally looking for in the logs. Tell them.”

  Mensah lifted her brows. “Well?”

  Gurathin hesitated. “It’s downloaded seven hundred hours of entertainment programming since we landed. Mostly serials. Mostly something called Sanctuary Moon.” He shook his head, dismissing it. “It’s probably using it to encode data for the company. It can’t be watching it, not in that volume; we’d notice.”

  I snorted. He underestimated me.

  Ratthi said, “The one where the colony’s solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby?”

  Again, I couldn’t help it. I said, “She didn’t kill him, that’s a fucking lie.”

  Ratthi turned to Mensah. “It’s watching it.”

  Her expression fascinated, Pin-Lee asked, “But how did you hack your own governor module?”

  “All the company equipment is the same.” I got a download once that included all the specs for company systems. Stuck in a cubicle with nothing to do, I used it to work out the codes for the governor module.

  Gurathin looked stubborn, but didn’t say anything. I figured that was all he had, now it was my turn. I said, “You’re wrong. HubSystem let you read my log, it let you find out about the hacked governor module. This is part of the sabotage. It wants you to stop trusting me because I’m trying to keep you alive.”

  Gurathin said, “We don’t have to trust you. We just have to keep you immobilized.”

  Right, funny thing about that. “That won’t work.”

  “And why is that?”

  I rolled off the table, grabbed Gurathin by the throat and pinned him to the wall. It was fast, too fast for them to react. I gave them a second to realize what had happened, to gasp, and for Volescu to make a little eek noise. I said, “Because HubSystem lied to you when it told you I was immobilized.”