Network Effect

(Possibly I had been too emphatic with her about Potential Target. After spending my entire existence having to gently suggest to humans that they not do things that would probably get them killed, it was nice to be able to tell them in so many words to not be so fucking stupid. But I didn’t regret doing it.)

An attempt by Amena to go around Mensah and appeal to Farai and Tano had failed spectacularly, in a three-way comm call that became a four-way when Farai had called Mensah to join in on the discussion. (I’m not sure what happened past that point. Even I hadn’t wanted to watch it.)

So that was what had happened before the survey. Now we’re here, ready for the next major disaster. (Spoiler warning.)

Chapter 3

We docked with our baseship with no problems, and Arada and the others transferred control to the baseship crew. (The facility wasn’t wormhole capable and was basically just a big, awkward lab module that could land and take off under its own power.)

It was only four standard Preservation day-cycles back to Preservation via wormhole, and I meant to use the time to finish watching Lineages of the Sun. It was a long-running historical family drama, set in an early colony world, with one hundred and thirty-six characters and almost as many storylines.

I’d watched family dramas before, but I’d never spent much time around human families before coming to Preservation. (Data suggests family dramas bear a less than 10 percent resemblance to actual human families, which is unsurprising and also a relief, considering all the murders. In the dramas, not Mensah’s family.)

When the company owned me and rented me out for surveys, my security protocol included datamining, which meant monitoring and recording the humans every second for the duration of the contract, which was excruciating in a lot of ways. Pretty much all the ways. (All the ways involving sex, bodily fluids, and inane conversations.) It would never stop being novel to be around a bunch of humans in a relatively confined space and be able to close a door between me and them and not have to care what they were doing.

Which didn’t mean the humans left me alone.

Ratthi came to my cabin. I didn’t have to let him in, so I did. (I know, I was still getting used to the idea of not minding the fact that a human wanted to talk to me.) He sat on the folding seat opposite my bunk and said, “Thiago will come around, you’ll see. He just doesn’t…”

Ratthi was reluctant to finish the sentence, so I did. “… trust me.”

Ratthi sighed. “It’s all the corporate propaganda about SecUnits being dangerous. He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know what you’re really like.”

This would be annoying, if Ratthi didn’t genuinely believe it. He’s never seen me kill anyone close up and I’d like to keep it that way.

“And he didn’t know why it was so important that Mensah be protected on station.” He waved a hand at me though I hadn’t said anything. “I know, the more people who knew, the more chance of the newsfeeds finding out. And there was nothing else we could have done, really.”

After Ratthi left, Overse came. When I told the door to open, she just stuck her head in and said, “I don’t want to interrupt, I just wanted to thank you. This is Arada’s first time as a survey lead, and you’ve been really supportive and I know that’s made a difference, and helped her confidence.”

I had no idea how to react to that since I wasn’t sure what being supportive entailed. My job wasn’t to make the humans obey Arada, that wasn’t how Preservation worked. Besides, that hadn’t been a problem. The survey team was grumbly occasionally, but everybody had done their job to a reasonable level. The chance of a mutiny was so low it was registering as a negative number. I’m not sure the word “mutiny” could even apply to any situation that might occur with this survey team; most of them had to be begged to complete the required self-defense certification before we left. And this was what Preservation called an academic survey, where the data collected was going into a public database. (If the planet had been in the Corporation Rim, it would be open to exploitation, but out here nobody wanted it for anything.) I defaulted to, “Arada contracted with me.”

“Yes, and we both know that you’re very capable of making it clear when you think someone doesn’t know what they’re doing.” She smiled at the drone I was using to watch her. “That’s all.”

She left and I replayed the conversation a couple of times.