Network Effect

But you have to see this. It was showing me annotations for feed and comm channels. You’d think these would all be active for targetControlSystem, right, but most of them aren’t. TargetControlSystem has control of the channels all through this part of this … I don’t know where we are, I guess it’s a building? But this section is being used by another system. And it’s sending a distress signal.

That was new. Distress signal? I checked the channel 2.0 indicated and found it. It was in an old Pre-CR LanguageBasic code: assistance needed, repeated at ten second intervals.

The “needed” was the key. If it had been assistance required or requested it would have been an indicator that it was sending to an entity within its own organization or network. “Needed” was begging, a plea to whoever was listening, help us, anyone, please.

(Yeah, it was really depressing around here right now.)

2.0 was still pushing information at me. It said, TargetControlSystem has cut off the sender’s outside access, so that’s why we couldn’t pick up the signal until we got inside here. And Sender hasn’t responded to my pings, so it may be trapped in send-only. You’re in its area of operation, that’s why I found you so fast.

I made a vague schematic of what I knew about the complex so far. Large structure on the surface, storage shaft below, lots of unknown space in the middle. I applied 2.0’s channel annotations and saw the section that it had marked as targetControlSystem’s must be in the upper levels and the surface structure. The shaft was cut off from comm and feed signals, and the UnidentifiedSender’s section was above the shaft, and reached up into the center part of the complex, woven in with TargetControlSystem.

Other me was right, it was strange that this other system was sitting here in the middle of everything, still active enough to be trying to send a distress signal. You want to contact UnidentifiedSender? I thought you wanted to kill TargetContact.

I think we should do that, too. But this is an anomaly.

Speaking of anomalies. I didn’t want to talk about it, but I probably should warn other me. I said, There’s a possibility I’ve been affected by alien remnant contamination. I showed it my video of the broken seal I’d found at the bottom of the shaft.

2.0 didn’t respond for a second. (Which was unusual because it had been responding almost as fast as I could complete a sentence.) Then it said, Diagnostics show structural damage and a sixty-eight percent performance reliability. That’s not so bad, considering.

I said, Alien remnant contamination isn’t going to show up on my diagnostics.

It said, You don’t know that.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, I can’t sit here and argue with myself all day.

UnidentifiedSender hadn’t accepted contact from 2.0, but then 2.0 was killware. Making contact could cause UnidentifiedSender to try and kill me, but 2.0 could just kill it back, so … And if it wasn’t hostile I could use it to try to reach ART or contact the humans. I checked my secure connection to the empty feed and sent a tentative ping.

The ten-second repeat stopped. The silence stretched to twenty seconds, then thirty. The assistance needed resumed again, but this time it wasn’t sending out into the void. It was sending to me.

It heard you, 2.0 said.

It had heard me, and now I had a direction. I shoved myself off the floor and staggered through the foyer to the next hatch.