Network Effect

I think if I had been a normal bot, or even like a normal SecUnit, just off inventory, naive and not knowing anything about how to get along in the human world or whatever, like the way humans would write it for the media, basically, it would have been okay. But I wasn’t like that. I was me, Murderbot.

So instead of Mensah having a pet bot like poor Miki, or a sad bot/human construct that needed someone to help it, she had me.

(I told this to Dr. Bharadwaj later, because we talked about a lot of things while she was doing research about bot/human relations for her documentary. After thinking about it, she said, “I wish I thought you were wrong.”)

(Farai was a possible exception. Up on the station, when Mensah had first introduced me to her family, she’d had a conversation with me. Or a conversation at me, you could say. Transcript:

Farai: “You know we’re grateful for how you returned her to us.”

I did know, I guess. What do humans say in this situation? A quick archive search came up with some variation on “okay, um” and even I knew that wasn’t going to cut it.

(Just a heads-up, when a murderbot stands there looking to the left of your head to avoid eye contact, it’s probably not thinking about killing you, it’s probably frantically trying to come up with a reply to whatever you just said to it.)

She added, “I wanted to ask what your relationship to her is.”

Uh. In the Corporation Rim, Mensah was my owner. On Preservation, she was my guardian. (That’s like an owner, but Preservation law requires they be nice to you.) But Mensah and Pin-Lee were trying to get my status listed as “refugee working as employee/security consultant.”

But I knew Farai knew all that, and I knew she was asking for an answer that was closer to objective reality. And wow, I did not have that answer. I said, “I’m her SecUnit.” (Yes, that’s still in the buffer.)

She lifted her brows. “And that means?”

Backed into yet another conversational corner, I fell back on honesty. “I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

She smiled. “Thank you.”

(And that was that.)

Mensah’s family were also weirded out by the idea that I would be providing security, and were afraid I would be, I don’t know, scaring legitimate visitors and killing people, I guess. And granted, while I have been a key factor in certain clusterfucks of gigantic proportions and my risk assessment module has serious issues, my threat assessment record is pretty great, like 93 percent. (Most of the negative points came from that time I didn’t know that Wilken and Gerth were hired killers until Wilken tried to shoot Don Abene in the head, but that was an outlier.)

Mensah’s family also thought they didn’t need security, which, maybe before GrayCris, that had been true. But as it was, during the festival I only had to deal with five incursions, four by outsystem newsfeed journalists with recording drones. I took control of the drones (I can always use a few more) and notified the local Rangers who drove off the human journalists. The fifth incursion was the one that got me in trouble with Amena, Mensah’s oldest offspring.

Since the festival had started, I had been taking note of a potential hostile that Amena had been associating with. Evidence was mounting up and my threat assessment was nearing critical. Things like: (1) he had informed her that his age was comparable to hers, which was just below the local standard for legal adult, but my physical scan and public record search indicated that he was approximately twelve Preservation standard calendar years older, (2) he never approached her when any family members or verified friends were with her, (3) he stared at her secondary sexual characteristics when her attention was elsewhere, (4) he encouraged her to take intoxicants that he wasn’t ingesting himself, (5) her parental and other related humans all assumed she was with her friends when she was seeing him and her friends all assumed she was with family and she hadn’t told either group about him, (6) I just had a bad feeling about the little shit.

You might think the obvious thing to do was to notify Mensah or Farai or Tano, the third marital partner. I didn’t.

If there was one thing I understood, it was the difference between proprietary and non-proprietary data.

So, on the night when Potential Target invited Amena to come back to his semi-isolated camp house with him to “meet some friends,” I decided to come along.

He led her into the darkened house, and she stumbled on a low table. She giggled and he laughed. Sounding way more intoxicated than he actually was, he said, “Wait, I got it,” and tapped the house’s feed to turn on the lights.

And I was standing in the middle of the room.

He screamed. (Yes, it was hilarious.)

Amena clapped a hand over her mouth, startled, then recognized me. She said, “What the hell? What are you doing here?”

Potential Target gasped, “What—Who—?”

Amena was furious. “That’s my second mother’s … friend,” she said through gritted teeth. “And her security … person.”