Network Effect

Now I was at 34 percent performance reliability and climbing steadily, lying on my side on ART’s medical platform. My jacket and deflection vest were gone and the surgical suite had cut away my shirt to get to the burned parts. I was sticky from all the leaky fluid and blood and parts falling off (yes, it’s just as disgusting as it sounds). But I didn’t feel nearly as bad as I had the last time I’d been here, when ART had altered my configuration.

ART. ART, you manipulative fucker.

Whatever was going on, there was nothing I could do about it now, and that just made me more furious. So I watched five minutes of episode 174 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Did that work? No, no, it didn’t.

Tentatively, I checked my inputs. (Tentatively, because I wanted to talk to a human right now about as much as I wanted to lose a couple of limbs and have a conversation about my feelings.) The drones I’d assigned to Amena had managed to survive. Following my last instruction to stay with her before they’d lost contact with me, they had adopted a tight circular formation a half-meter above her head. They had been collecting video the entire time I was out, and I ran it back to see what had happened.

I forwarded through the boring parts with Amena being upset because of the whole me-lying-in-a-pool-of-steaming-blood-and-fluid thing and Arada trying to tell her this actually wasn’t unusual for me, then the gurney arriving. (It was a medical assistance device, designed to either bring casualties to the MedSystem or to carry them off a damaged ship, so its power and functions were autonomous. It was sort of like a big maintenance drone, capable of a certain range of actions, built in the shape of a rack with expandable shelves and arms. How it had survived the purge of ART’s other drones, I don’t know. Unless the Targets just hadn’t known what it was when it was folded up in its inert state.)

It zipped in from the foyer, angled itself up the stairs, scooped me onto itself and clamped me down. (I hate being carted around like equipment, even though technically I am actually equipment.) As it started back down, Amena tried to follow it and Arada grabbed her arm. Looking up the way humans did when they were trying to talk to something they couldn’t see, Arada said, “Hello, your name is Art? Can you tell me if there’s anyone else aboard this ship?”

ART said, There is an additional unidentified human in Medical, but she appears to be an injured noncombatant. I assume the two other humans present there are part of your group. All the intruders are accounted for.

Amena wiped her nose (humans are so disgusting) and said, “That’s Eletra, she was a prisoner when we got here. Ras is there, too, but he’s dead.” She pulled away from Arada to follow the gurney down the stairs.

Arada, with an expression somewhere between thoughtful and alarmed, trailed after her. Arada said, “Thank you, that’s a relief to hear. But can you tell us who you are?”

Amena followed the gurney into the foyer. “That’s the ship. It’s SecUnit’s friend.” She threw a glance upward. “That’s you, right? You’re the transport?”

Thiago knelt over dead Target Six, turning the helmeted head to see the face. He looked up, startled. “The transport?”

ART said, Correct.

“But bot pilots don’t talk like this,” Thiago said to Arada, keeping his voice low. “It can’t be a bot.”

Hah.

Arada didn’t bother to comment on that. “Transport, what happened here?” she asked. “Why did you attack our survey facility?”

ART said, I am still reinitializing after a forced shutdown and deletion. I have prioritized restoring the MedSystem to full function.

Amena’s drones caught an image of Arada and Thiago exchanging a brow-lifted look before she followed the gurney. Yeah, I think they had both noticed that ART had deliberately not answered the direct question. (Pro tip: when bots do that, it’s not a good sign.)

I had to forward again through all the back and forth of getting me to Medical. Arada and Thiago stayed in the control area, and Overse went to join them, but Amena’s drones didn’t see a lot of that. She was sitting in Medical watching the surgical suite work on me and trying to tell Ratthi what had happened. It was confusing, with the humans talking on their comms, but I didn’t care enough to filter the raw video and separate out the different conversations. The only part that was new was about the safepod.