Network Effect

ART said, That’s obvious.

I know, I walked into that one, which oddly enough, did not make me any less mad. I said, “You came here for a reason, and it wasn’t a distress call. What was it?”

On the side of the room to my right, this was going on:

(Eletra whispered to Overse and Ratthi, “Why are you letting your SecUnit … do this?”

Overse’s jaw tightened. She said, “It’s not our SecUnit, it’s—”

Ratthi squeezed her wrist and gave her what I recognized as a “don’t trust the corporates” look. He told Eletra, “It’s normally very responsible.”)

Thiago was eyeing me through the conference image, frowning. He said, “It is a good question.”

(Of course, none of the sensible humans are supporting me now, it has to be the one who never agrees with me when I’m not being an idiot.) I said to ART, “Why were you here? What do you really do? Deep space research, teaching humans, cargo hauling, none of those are reasons to be here, in the system where corporates were trying to salvage a dead colony.”

ART said, Everything that occurred before my crew was captured is irrelevant. It is none of your business.

I said, “You made it my business when you kidnapped me.”

You are not here against your will. Leave whenever you want. You know where the door is.

That sounded just as sarcastic and mean as you think it did. Also possibly really threatening to the humans. Arada and Ratthi were both waving at me, making gestures which I interpreted as urgent requests for me to shut up now. But I had gotten ART to lose its temper again and be threatening, and that was what I wanted. I folded my arms and said, “You’re upsetting Amena.”

I’d noted that ART’s tone when it spoke to Amena was completely different than it was to the other humans. I didn’t think it would hurt the others, but it wasn’t careful of their feelings the way it was of Amena’s. Whatever else ART was, the classroom space and bunkrooms said it was actually, on a regular basis, a teaching vessel. And before this when I was stupid and we were still friends it had talked about human adolescents in an indulgent way.

Amena took a breath, probably to object, based on her whole “despite being a relatively sheltered adolescent from the most naive human society in existence, I feel a need to pretend that none of this is bothering me” thing. I looked at her and tapped our private feed connection. Be honest.

She let the breath out. She prodded the deck with the toe of her shoe and admitted, reluctantly, “The gray people were terrifying. And being shot at, and … I’d really like to know what’s going on, not just a convenient story.”

There was a long silence. I felt a lot of human eyes looking at me, and the sense of weight and attention through the feed that was ART. Finally ART said, I have to violate my crew’s confidentiality agreement in order to answer that question.

I said, “You kidnapped me and my humans. That violated my contract. A contract I made with them, myself.” Not a company contract, I meant. A me contract. And ART had got me dragged into this and messed everything up.

ART said, I will consider it. Then it put up a connection schematic, which showed it had just cut Eletra’s active connection out of the general feed. On a closed channel with me and my five humans, ART said, This information must be kept private. If any of you reveal anything I tell you to the corporate representative, I will kill her.

I had a release of adrenaline from my organic parts. Uncomfortable, and weird. I wasn’t attached to Eletra, who seemed like the typical human client I had had with the company. (Not too dumb, not too smart, and only 53 percent likely to do something that ended up with me (1) shot (2) abandoned on a hostile planet.) But she was adjacent to my humans and I didn’t like the idea of anybody dying anywhere in that neighborhood.

The humans clearly had a moment of tension. There were a lot of gazes all intersecting each other and attempts to conceal worried expressions. Then Arada said, Agreed. We won’t tell her anything. She cleared her throat and said aloud, “Maybe we can use your cabins, to clean up and rest?”

ART said, on the general feed, Of course.