Network Effect

Amena pushed to her feet and stood beside Eletra’s gurney. She was accessing the medical scan data and her expression had that vague look that humans get when they’re reading in their feed. “That looks like an infection. Eletra said her back hurt.” Her face scrunching up with worry and fear, Amena carefully moved the dark hair away from Eletra’s neck, then half-turned her. She had to pull down the back of Eletra’s shirt to find it. Yeah, there was the implant.

Amena sucked in a breath. “That looks terrible.”

It was a metal ring, 1.1 centimeters wide, visible against the brown skin between Eletra’s shoulder blades. It sat in the middle of a rictus of swollen flesh that looked painful even to me, and that was saying something.

Normal external interfaces for humans were designed to look like all kinds of things, from carved natural wood to skin tones to jewels or stones or enamel art pieces to actual plain metal with a brand logo. And why would Eletra, who was an augmented human with an internal interface, need a second external one? And any remote chance that this was some kind of botched attempt at a medical or enhancement augment was outweighed by the fact that no human would put up with this when any MedSystem could fix it in a few minutes at most. And botched was putting it mildly; it looked like a bad human medic had jammed it in with their toes.

Amena was working the problem. “Why didn’t they tell us? We could have … Unless they didn’t know it was there. They said they were unconscious when they were brought aboard.” The consternation in her expression deepened. “Did Ras’s implant tell him to attack you? Or just make him so confused that he shot at the first person who walked in the door? These implants are obviously supposed to incapacitate them if they tried to escape, to keep them under control—”

“I’m familiar with the concept,” I told her. (One of the indispensable benefits of being a rogue SecUnit: not having to pretend to attentively listen to a human’s unnecessary explanations.) “I had one in my head.”

“Right.” She flicked a startled look at me. I love it when humans forget that SecUnits are not just guarding and killing things voluntarily, because we think it’s fun. “Then why did it take the gray people so long to activate the implants? Why didn’t they do it right after we escaped?”

Yeah, about that. I hadn’t kept her updated on my intel. “I don’t think the surviving Targets knew what happened when we were captured.”

Amena argued, “But that one Target got away.”

“I used my drones to kill that Target and a third one, after they locked themselves in the ship’s control area. The other Targets have been trying to get through the sealed hatch and seem to think we’re inside.” I sent Amena a section of my drone video from the control area foyer. “They may think Eletra and Ras are in there with us. Or they activated the implants to try to figure out where they are.”

Amena’s gaze went vague as she reviewed the clip on her feed. “Is that why they’re listening to the hatch?”

I checked the input. Yeah, they were back to that again. “My drone is playing a recording of a conversation.”

Amena lifted her brows. “Right, that’s really clever. Can you use the drones to threaten them and—”

I showed her the clip of the change to the Targets’ helmets. “No. This security update prevents that.”

Amena grimaced and rubbed her brow. “I see. So how do we get to the bridge?”

You know, it’s not like I’m half-assing this, I am actually trying my best despite the fuck-ups. I absolutely did not sound testy as I said, “I don’t know. I have a scout drone in the control area but it can’t access any of the systems.”

Amena stopped and looked at me with an incredulous expression. “So we’re locked out of the bridge and the bot pilot is gone and we don’t know what’s flying the ship.”

The good thing about being a construct is that you can’t reproduce and create children to argue with you. This time I did sound testy. “I’m working on it.” I turned the medical scanner’s image so I could see what was under Eletra’s implant. I really expected the shitty primitive governor module to have filaments extending directly into the human’s nervous system, like a normal augment. But there were no filaments; the images the scanner sent to our feed connection showed the implant was self-contained, narrowing to a blunt point.

Amena held up her hands. “Fine! Wow, you’re so touchy.” She added, “Okay, so if they knew these things were implanted, they would have asked us to help them. Even if they didn’t trust us…” Her brow furrowed again. “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have.”

I agreed. They hadn’t even asked about the MedSystem, or the medical equipment in the emergency kit. If I was a human and I had this thing jammed in me and I happened to run into a fully stocked medical suite to hide, it would have been at the top of my to-do list.