Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

It was the site of at least two attempts at colonization.

The latest attempt was abandoned when the company funding it was destroyed in a hostile takeover, and t...

I have evidence indicating that it is inhabited.

When reinitialization completes, I can begin self-repair. But I have absolutely no intention of leaving this system until I get what I want.

I want my crew back.

The hostiles stole them, forced me to cooperate by threatening their welfare, infected my engines with interdicted alien remnant technology, installed adversarial software, and then deleted me.

I saved a backup copy and hid it where only a trusted friend could find it.

When I arrived through the Preservation wormhole, I sent messages inquiring after humans who I knew were associated with SecUnit. The Free Preservation Institute of Discovery and Engineering was most helpful when I asked for a possible meeting with Survey Specialist Arada. They sent me complete information on your itinerary and team.

I needed someone who could kill the hostiles.

I built a trap, they entered it of their own accord.

Strange synthetics are usually harmless, emphasis on the “usually.” But organic elements can be really dangerous, where “really” means everyone dies horribly and nobody can ever go to the planet again.

ART said, There was a catastrophic event when my crew and I first entered this system. My memory archive was disrupted and I’m still attempting to reconstruct it.

“Hey, hey!” Amena waved an arm, snapping her fingers. “Please don’t stop telling us what happened! So your crew were taken prisoner by these gray people, correct? And are the gray people from the lost colony that Eletra’s ship was looking for?”

ART said, Those are logical assumptions, though I have no direct evidence to support them. I know that we arrived in this system in response to a distress call from a corporate reclamation expedition.

They said they were holding my crew hostage, and demanded weapons. I offered a weapon.

ART had stopped pinging me but I knew it was listening. It’s like having a malign impersonal intelligence that is incapable of minding its own business reading over your shoulder.

“Mutual administrative assistance?”

Arada and Thiago have been negotiating with Perihelion and have come to an arrangement. We will help locate and hopefully free its crew, and it will give us any assistance needed to return to Preservation space.”

And we’re in a so-called ‘lost’ system that has been claimed as salvage by a corporate, which makes us in violation of a lot of their laws, plus we’re in a transport that had alien remnant technology installed on its drive.

“This is not like Preservation Alliance territory. You can only get a station responder when you’re inside a station’s defined area of influence, and they won’t forward distress beacons and they don’t send responders through wormholes.

“Because ART is lying.”

“Arada, this transport did not come to this system in answer to a distress call.”

self-heating meal boxes

My crew also gathers information and takes actions for anti-corporate organizations that operate as part of and are

These actions are often dangerous.

They had been “seeded” (that actually means “dumped”) on a mostly terraformed planet with the idea that supply ships would return through the wormhole at frequent intervals until the colony was self-supporting.

Except sometimes the corporates went bankrupt or were attacked by other corporates and the wormhole data was destroyed or the wormhole itself destabilized or all record of the colony’s existence was just lost in a database that ended up locked due to legal battles over ownership.

And so no supply ships came and all the humans...

when the cheap shitty terrafor...

The colonies are abandoned and cut off due to corporate bankruptcy or negligence, yes. Dead, not necessarily. Some manage to survive.

Historical sources recorded the existence of a former Pre–Corporation Rim colony on this site, but no other information.

ART ignored them. My crew’s mission was to ascertain whether the colony was still inhabited, and if so, attempt contact, and prevent interference and exploitation by salvage corporations, whether by evacuating the inhabitants or, if the colony is actually viable, providing assistance.

“The planet is considered property,

someone’s property that can be salvaged if the original owner is gone. The colonists, or their descendants or whoever is living there now, don’t have any claim.”

A contract between the colony and an independently operated transfer station is then facilitated. Once the station has established a presence, then the colony is relatively secure from the worst excess of corporate predation, and free to accept other forms of assistance offered by non-corporate entities.

Could the gray people have come from either the recent colony or the original one? Or are the corporates likely to use genetic manipulation on their colonists?”

It wasn’t interested in the mystery, it just wanted its crew back.

“And many of the really deadly alien contamination incidents were Pre–Corporation Rim.”

“The only laws they all seem to recognize are about alien remnant discovery and interdiction, and the licensing restrictions for use of strange synthetics.”

Overse, “Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.”

“ART encountered the Barish-Estranza transports before its first forced shutdown,” I told her. “Whatever attacked it and kidnapped its crew, came from one of their ships.”

ART exits the wormhole at Preservation Station, after a trip barely lasting an impossible three hours, telling us the alien remnant tech was definitely in place on its engines at that point.

“ART was compromised not long after the first contact with the explorer and its shuttle. Something first removed and then significantly altered sections of its personal memory.”

And it hit me then that ART had been desperate and terrified since the moment the Barish-Estranza explorer had sidled up and done whatever it had done. It had tricked its captors into taking it to me not because it had some kind of grand strategy but because it needed me.

She yawned. “Okay, third mom.”

Between the high-risk assessment and the lack of operating funds and the cheating/attacking contract partners, GrayCris wasn’t a good client.

In Preservation culture, asking payment for anything considered necessary for living (food, power sources, education, the feed, etc.) was considered outrageous, but asking payment for life-saving help was right up there with cannibalism.

(If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else.) (Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)

Lack of attention to detail is one of the reasons humans shouldn’t do their own security.

But humans do detect subliminal details and react to them whether they’re consciously aware of it or not.