Network Effect

The wide corridor beyond the lock was empty, lights tuned to medium-strength, blue bands on the bulkheads serving no function except decorative. A transparent locker built into the bulkhead held a row of empty EVAC suits, dormant and ready for emergencies.

The corridor was quiet, empty on visual, scan, and audio. The lights brightened for us, which was typical for crewed ships, which adjust the lighting based on what the humans are doing and on request. My suit read the air system level as full, which meant normal for humans and augmented humans. When ART ran as an uncrewed cargo transport, it kept its support level on minimum, though it had upped it for me.

There were too many ways to kill us using the airlock, so I stepped over the seal into the corridor. I pulled Amena’s suit with me, to make sure there was no opportunity to separate us. The lock cycled closed behind us.

On our suit comm, Amena was saying, “Where are the crew? Why did they do this? What do they want with us?” Then, in a smaller voice, “Please talk to me.”

I still had a client, even if I was damaged and hallucinating. If this was a memory failure, I had to tell her. I wished she was Mensah, or any human I trusted to help me. Even Gurathin would have been better in this situation. If I told her that indications suggested that I was having some bizarre memory crash, she would never trust me and I needed her to trust me to get her out of this alive. Except could she trust me when I couldn’t even tell if what I was seeing/scanning was real or not?

And if this was really ART, then where the hell was it?

I sent a ping. It was almost like it echoed in the empty feed, like the giant presence that should be here was just absent, like the heart of the ship was hollow.

Amena was breathing harder with building panic, and I needed to say something. What came out was pretty close to the truth: “I think I recognize this ship, but it’s not supposed to be here.”

Saying it aloud made it seem a lot less like a memory failure, and more like something that was actually happening.

Amena made a sniffing noise. She said, “What—what ship is it?”

Then I had a brilliant idea that I should have had earlier. I said, “What do the patches on those EVAC suits say?”

Mensah and most of the others would have realized immediately that something was wrong; I never asked clients for information if I could help it. (For a lot of reasons but close to the top was the all-too-common suicidal lack of attention to detail humans were prone to.) Amena stepped closer to the transparent locker. There were two rows of suits visible, one above the other, so if a suit was removed from its slot another would slide down to replace it. The patches were throwing a localized broadcast into the feed in multiple languages, readable by interfaces and our EVAC suits even while ART’s feed was inaccessible, the same way marker paints worked. Amena said aloud, “Perihelion. Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.”

That was ART’s designation and registry. Okay, so. Good news: I’m not having some kind of memory or system crash, this was really ART. Bad news: what the fuck?

I sent another ping.

Amena turned back to me. “This must be a stolen survey ship.” Her voice was firmer, less breathy with incipient panic. “I guess the raiders armed it.”

“It was already armed.” I thought, It’s my friend. It helped me because it wanted to, because it could. I couldn’t say any of that. I hadn’t told anyone about ART. “It’s a deep space research and teaching vessel with a full crew and passenger complement. Between missions it travels as a bot-piloted cargo vessel, but Preservation isn’t on its route.”

“Research and teaching vessel,” Amena repeated. “If the raiders had a ship this big, with weapons, why bother with us? Maybe they thought we had something valuable on board? Or they just go around attacking research ships? They hate research?”

She was being sarcastic but I knew of raiders who had done things like this for reasons almost as stupid. But this wasn’t a memory ghost/hallucination, which meant it was still a statistically unlikely coincidence, and that was … statistically unlikely.

“Wait, you know this ship.” Her voice turned suspicious. The statistically unlikely part must have occurred to her, too. “Did you do something to them? Are they here after you?”

“Of course not.” That was a total lie, because ART had to have come here after me, though knowing that didn’t make this any less baffling. It wasn’t like ART’s crew came here for revenge because the murderous rogue SecUnit— Hold it, could they be here for revenge? I hadn’t hurt ART or anything onboard, unless you counted some power and resource usage that ART had expunged from its logs.

That seemed a weird thing to shoot up an unarmed survey ship over. I mean, they could have just sent Dr. Mensah an invoice.