Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

tip us out of incipient shitshow into full-on shitshow.

He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and that was fine. It was absolutely fine. I walked away down the corridor.

(I used drones to record the performances that were overlapping or scheduled against each other. They were all being recorded for the local planetary entertainment feed, and the popular ones would be reconfigured as video productions, but I wanted to see all the versions.)

(That didn’t apply to the seven kids. I was illicitly trading downloads via the feed with three of them.)

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.

Humans in the Preservation Alliance didn’t have to sign up for contract labor and get shipped off to mines or whatever for 80 to 90 percent of their lifespans.

There was some strange system where they all got their food and shelter and education and medical for free, no matter what job they did.

the all-too-common suicidal lack of attention to detail humans were prone to.)

“It’s a deep space research and teaching vessel with a full crew and passenger complement. Between missions it travels as a bot-piloted cargo vessel, but Preservation isn’t on its route.”

Maybe they thought we had something valuable on board?

“Did you do something to them? Are they here after you?”

I hadn’t hurt ART or anything onboard, unless you counted some power and resource usage that ART had expunged from its logs.

Was something else—bot or human or augmented human—controlling ART’s ship-body?

Why come to Preservation space after me? ART loved its crew, like, a lot. It would do anything to help them.

I was going to break into targetControlSystem and do terrible things to it.

“The locations to a lot of systems were lost before wormhole stabilizing tech was developed, but researchers find them sometimes in reconstructed data troves. If a corporation can find the planet’s location, they can file for ownership, then they’re free to establish a colony.”

“Lost?” From Amena’s expression, she understood now, but she didn’t like it. “You mean abandoned colonies, settlements where the first arrivals were just left to fend for themselves.”

“Reclaiming the lost colonies is big business now,” Ras

“The terraforming equipment is usually still in place, as well as habitats and other salvage.”

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

(Technically, I am a security system, so it was easy to get other security systems to interact with me, or to confuse them into thinking I was already part of them.)

I’d seen shows about humans and augmented humans trapped in wormholes indefinitely. They ranged from bleakly depressing (due to an excess of realism) to highly unlikely (due to an excess of optimism).

At least the humans in the shows knew they were on a potentially endless trip, and not just a long one.

My drones are tiny intel drones, but most of ART’s were larger, with multiple arms and physical interfaces so they could perform maintenance and other specialized tasks.

A lot of my ability to do threat assessment (like pick potential hostiles out of crowds or tell which stupid boat is full of raiders instead of curious locals) is based on pattern matching off a database of human behaviors.

(SecUnits weren’t allowed to sit down, ever, but humans and augmented humans did it every chance they had.)

This thing on the engine housing is an alien remnant. I think it’s taking us through the wormhole at a much faster rate. Much faster. Not hours instead of cycles, but minutes instead of cycles.

ART’s engines had been compromised by a device that was using the wormhole in a completely different way, allowing travel faster than any transport technology that I’d seen in media, or heard about on the newsfeeds. Faster than any human transport technology.

(The Targets couldn’t be alien, could they? No, that wasn’t possible. Aliens couldn’t look that much like humans.) (Could they?)

(File under save-for-later: this confirms the camouflage is a physical effect, something in the design visible on their casing, not an unknown type of transmitted interference.)

The comm hidden in the pocket under my ribs, the comm ART had given me when I left it on RaviHyral’s transit ring, pinged my internal feed with a message. It was a compressed packet, a type meant to be sent in-system, not carried via transports through wormholes. Which meant it had originated with ART’s internal comm array. It was tagged with the name “Eden.”

Eden was the name I used on RaviHyral, when ART had helped me.

The fact that a message stuck in the comm’s store and forward buffer had finally been delivered meant that as targetControlSystem failed, some of ART’s more complex systems were beginning to restart.

The compressed video clip in the packet was from the serial World Hoppers, from a story arc climax episode, when a secondary main character’s mind had been taken over by a sentient brain-virus (I know) and the story was really much better than it sounds but it was the moment when the character said, I am trapped in my own body.

ART was a big transport with a lot of interactive processes and systems working in concert, which meant there were a lot of storage spaces that would not be obvious to human intruders. Or to hostile operating systems like targetControlSystem that seemed unable to use most of the architecture.

Storage spaces where you could save a compressed backup copy of a kernel. Possibly your own kernel, if you were an advanced sentient control system who was very smart and very sneaky.

It was accepted and the storage space opened to reveal a large compressed file. Attached to it was a short instruction document with a few lines of complex code I couldn’t parse. But the instructions were clear.

They said, “In case of emergency, run.” I pulled the code into the operating station’s processing area and ran it.

ART said, You are aboard the Perihelion, registered teaching and research vessel of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Then it added, I’m not going to hurt your humans, you little idiot.

“ART,” I said aloud, because ART could silence my feed if it wanted to. “You did this. You sent those assholes to kidnap my humans.”

Of course not, ART said. I sent them to kidnap you.

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 manipulati...

ART said, The foreign device detached from my drive and

ceased to function when the invading system was deleted. Further interference is not advisable.

ART had been expecting me to be aboard at some point to run its emergency code, which would uncompress the backup and reload it into its hardware.

Which meant it had sent the Targets to find me in Preservation space and given them the ability to track me via the comm I had stashed in my rib compartment.

Which meant ART had been conscious and capable of affecting events during the attack on ...

This system has a numerical designation assigned by a corporation which was investigating it for salvage.