Network Effect

They had been talking about me as a SecUnit the way humans always talked about SecUnits, and it had been pretty mild, compared to a lot of things I had heard humans say. If I got angry every time that happened … I don’t know, but it sounded exhausting. Talking about this was exhausting. “I’m not angry about that.”

Amena demanded, “If you’re not angry, then what’s wrong?”

I was definitely glaring now. “How do you want the list sorted? By time stamp or degree of survivability?”

Amena said in exasperation, “I mean what’s wrong with you!”

There’s that question again, but I assumed she didn’t want to discuss the existential quandary posed by my entire existence. “I got hit on the head by an unidentified drone and shot, you were there!”

“Not that! Why are you sad and upset?” That was the point where even I could tell that Amena was terrified as well as furious. “There’s something you’re not telling me and it’s scaring me! I’m not a fucking hero like my second mom or a genius like everybody else in my family, I’m just ordinary, and you’re all I’ve got!”

I wasn’t expecting that. It was so far from what I thought she had meant, and she was so upset, that the truth inadvertently came out. “My friend is dead!”

Amena was startled. Staring blankly at me, she asked, “What friend? Somebody on the survey?”

I couldn’t stop now. “No, this transport. This bot pilot. It was my friend, and it’s dead. I think it’s dead. I don’t see how it would have let this happen if it wasn’t dead.” Wow, that did not sound rational.

Amena’s expression did something complicated. She took a step toward me. I backed up a step. She stopped, held up her hands palm-out, and said in a softer voice, “Hey, I think you need to sit down.”

Now she was talking to me like I was a hysterical human. Worse, I was acting like a hysterical human. “I don’t have time to sit down.” When I was owned by the company, I wasn’t allowed to sit down. Now humans keep wanting me to sit down. “I have a lot of code to write so I can hack the targetControlSystem.”

Amena started to reach out for me and then pulled her hand back when I stepped away again. “But I think you’re emotionally compromised right now.”

That was … that was so completely not true. Stupid humans. Sure, I’d had an emotional breakdown with the whole evisceration thing, but I was fine now, despite the drop in performance reliability. Absolutely fine. And I had to kill the rest of the Targets in the extremely painful ways I’d been visualizing. I needed to check Scout One’s data to see if I could tell where we were going in the wormhole and how long it would take us to get there. And it occurred to me there might not be a destination, if whatever was controlling ART’s functions knew I’d killed three Targets and had decided to revenge them by trapping us in the wormhole forever. I said, “I am not. You’re emotionally compromised.”

(I know, but at the time it seemed like a relevant comeback.)

Amena, like a rational person, ignored it. She said persuasively, “Won’t it be easier to write code if you sit down?”

I still wanted to argue. But maybe I did want to sit down.

I sat down on the floor and cautiously tuned up my pain sensors. Oh yeah, that hurt.

Amena knelt down in front of me, angling her head so she could see my face. This did not help. She said, “I know you don’t eat, but is there anything I can get you, like something from the kit or a blanket…”

I covered my face. “No.”

Right, so say, just theoretically, I was emotionally compromised. A recharge cycle which I actually didn’t need right now wasn’t going to help with that. So what would help with that?

Taking over targetControlSystem and hurting it very, very badly, that’s what would help with that.

My drone view showed Amena getting up and pacing slowly across the room, her shoulders drooping. Then on the platform, Eletra stirred and made bleary noises. Amena hurried over to her, saying, “Hey, it’s all right. You’re okay.”

Eletra blinked and peered up at her. She managed to say, “What happened? Is Ras all right?”

Amena leaned against the platform, and from the high angle she looked older, with lines on either side of her mouth. Keeping her voice low, she said, “I’m sorry, he died. You had these strange implants in your back, that were hurting you, and his killed him. We had to take yours out and it almost killed you. Did you know they were there?”

Eletra looked baffled. “What? No, that’s … I don’t understand…”