Network Effect

Huh. We had always thought that somehow the implants, even though they seemed like boring old human tech, were connected to alien remnant contamination. This sure didn’t disprove that theory but I still needed more intel.

The SecUnit said, Query: do you have intel on SecUnit 2’s position/situation?

I had a bad feeling I knew the answer to that question. What was SecUnit 2’s last contact?

Last contact was on space dock with the client tactical squad. Contact was lost. SecUnit 1 was destroyed when the Hostiles breached the hatch. It hesitated 1.2 seconds and added, I am SecUnit 3.

I really wanted to lie. I’d seen that SecUnit in ART’s status update before I deployed. But I wanted it to trust me, so I had to tell it the truth. I said, The Targets left SecUnit 2 on the space dock after forcing one of your clients to order a stand down and freeze. It was killed by its governor module.

It didn’t respond. Then it said, Thank you for that information.

I had one of the mostly dead SecSystem’s inputs monitoring the bridge and had picked up a brief conversation. Running it through the translation module told me it was a discussion about how to make engine failure look convincing. The Targets couldn’t contact ART to tell it about the hostages, so they wanted ART to catch the explorer and dock with it. That way they could use its crew to force it to surrender.

I asked SecUnit 3, Is the shuttle’s bot pilot still active? I hadn’t been able to find it but maybe it was hiding.

It was destroyed. But … I have a piloting module. It added, It’s not very good.

That it was willing to admit that to me was a good sign. If I can free the humans, can you get them into the shuttle and away? The transport following us will pick you up. This was hard to ask. Trusting other SecUnits was impossible, when you knew humans could order them to do anything. Trusting a SecUnit another rogue SecUnit was trying to make into a rogue was worse, even if you were one of the rogues involved. I was glad my threat assessment module was back in my body, because it would have metaphorically shit itself.

It didn’t respond and I said, Will you help me retrieve the humans?

My governor module is holding me in stand-down-and-freeze mode, it said, still polite and not pointing out the fact that I should know it would move if it could, and how teeth-grittingly obvious that was.

I’d been investigating possibilities with the SecSystem, trying to see if I could make it override the governor module and rescind the order. I’d have to do a restart and reload first, and there was no way to do that surreptitiously; targetControlSystem would know something/somebody was in the system. Also, taking orders from/making friends with a rogue SecUnit killware definitely fell under the category of “stuff SecUnits are not allowed to do” and the governor module might fry it anyway. That left only one option and me trying to gently hint about it wasn’t working.

I can disable your governor module, I said. I am not good at this kind of thing. Even Mensah was not good at this kind of thing, considering what happened when she bought me. I just knew it had to be SecUnit 3’s decision. I’ll do that whether you help me or not.

But that was too much, too soon, and I knew that as soon as I said it. It gave me a stock answer from its buffer: I don’t have that information.

Right, I wouldn’t have been eager to believe me, either. I needed a different approach.

We didn’t have time for me to show it 35,000 hours of media and I didn’t have access to my longterm storage anyway. And that had worked on me, but I knew I was weird even for a SecUnit. Maybe it would trust me more if it knew me better. I pulled some recent memories from the files I’d brought with me, edited them together, and added one helpful code bundle at the end.

:send helpme.file: Read this.