Network Effect

Amena was almost as angry as I was. “What’s wrong with you?” she shouted at Ras. She glared at Eletra, who made a helpless, baffled gesture. You know, if Ras was going to turn on me, he might have at least warned Eletra first so she wasn’t standing around wondering what the hell was going on.

Ras shoved to his feet and said, “You can’t trust—any of them! It could be any of them—They control them—” He staggered back away from us. His eyes were unfocussed. “You don’t—any of them—”

Amena’s furious expression turned confused. “Any of what?”

That was a good question. I’d seen humans do irrational things (a lot of irrational things) and encounter situations that made them act in ways that were counterproductive at best. (This was not the first time I’d been shot in the head by a human I was trying to protect, let’s put it that way.) But this was odd, even granting the fact that I’d physically intimidated Ras earlier.

Eletra winced and pressed a hand to her head. “Ras, that doesn’t make sense, what—” Then her eyes rolled up and she collapsed.

Amena made a grab for her, then flinched away when Ras folded up and hit the floor. Then Eletra started to convulse. Amena threw herself down on the deck, trying to support Eletra’s head. Ras lay in a tumble, completely limp.

Amena looked frantic. I was a little frantic, too. “They took some medication from the emergency kit,” she said. She jerked her head toward the open kit and the container beside it. “They’re supposed to be analgesics—could they be poisoned?”

It wasn’t a bad suggestion, but if this was something in the medication, I thought the reaction would involve bodily fluids and be way more disgusting. Amena wasn’t affected, so it wasn’t something spread by contact or transmitted through the air system or the water containers. Eletra looked more like her nervous system was being jolted by a power source. Ras looked … Ras looked dead.

I stepped over to the emergency kit still sitting on the bench. It had some limited autonomous functions and had expanded and opened new compartments, responding to the humans’ distress. I took the small medical scanner it was trying to hand me and pointed it at Ras. It sent its report to my feed, with scan images of the inside of Ras’s body. A power source had jolted through the upper part of his chest, destroying the important parts there for pumping blood and breathing.

It looked, oddly, like what being punished by a governor module felt like—

Now there’s a thought.

I checked Scout Two in the control area foyer. The Targets had stopped listening at the sealed hatch and were gathered around Target Four, who now held a strange, bulky device. It was twelve centimeters across and a millimeter thick, with a flat old-fashioned solid-state screen. (I’d seen them on historical dramas.) All the Targets seemed excited about whatever it was showing them.

If it was something that made the Targets happy, it couldn’t be good.

My scan detected a tiny power source on both Eletra and Ras. It hadn’t been there earlier so something had activated it, most likely a signal from Target Four’s screen device. There was no time for finesse; I jammed the whole range.

Eletra slumped, limp and unconscious. If there’d been a last-ditch destroy-the-brain function, there was nothing I could do about it.

Scout Two now showed Target Four poking angrily at the screen as the others watched in obvious disappointment. Hah.

Amena, in the middle of yelling, “Will you stop just standing there and do something—” halted abruptly. The rest came out as a startled huff. She added, “Did you do that?”

“Yes.” I crouched down and lifted Eletra out of Amena’s lap. “This was caused by implants.”

I carried Eletra over to the nearest gurney and carefully set her down. Amena scrambled up and went to Ras. She reached for his arm and I said, “He’s dead.”

She jerked her hand back, then fumbled for the pulse in his neck. “What—How?”

I sent the medscanner’s images to her feed and she winced. “You said it was an implant? Is that like an augment?”

“No, it’s like an implant.” Augments were supposed to help humans do things they couldn’t otherwise do, like interface with the feed more completely or store memory archives. Augments that weren’t feed interfaces were meant to correct physical injuries or illnesses. Augments are helpful; implants are like governor modules.

I pointed the medscanner at Eletra. It found a raised temperature, increased heart rate, and increased respiration rate. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded bad. “When this happened, I had a drone view of the Targets in the central section using an unknown device.”