Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

(Normal = neutral expression concealing existential despair and brain-crushing boredom.)

I was getting tired of being told what to do. Self-determination was a pain in the ass sometimes but it beat the alternative by a lot.

(Overse was right, alien remnants were the one thing the whole Corporation Rim agreed was bad. Not that there weren’t corporates like GrayCris who would sell them if they thought they could get away with it, but the liability bonds and the chances of wiping out your entire population made it rare.)

Humans and constructs were full of overwrought emotions like depression, anxiety, and anger (was anxiety an emotion? It sure felt like one) and I had no idea what ART was full of, except how much it cared about its crew.

On the company gunship, I’d moved my consciousness into the bot pilot’s processing space to help it fight the sentient killware, but this was different;

I’d never copied myself and I wasn’t sure how to start, unless I had a place to put me. I couldn’t just stick Me.copy into ART’s semi-completed code, not without ART’s help.

For a being as sophisticated as you are, it is baffling how little understanding you have of the composition of your own mind.

Which turned it from an argument into a fight,

(Foolproof is another weird word. Shouldn’t it be smartproof?

I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.

I don’t know what was worse, getting a bunch of “volunteer” contract labor colonists killed as part of an investment scheme, or getting a bunch of actual volunteer colonists killed because of mistakes and mismanagement that ended up exposing the controlling corporation to a hostile takeover.

Hah, Thiago called them Targets.

In the Corporation Rim, transients were lucky to be able to pay for tubes to sleep in, tubes that were slightly less comfortable than the crates used to ship SecUnits to contracts.

Here on Preservation Station, they got a whole room with a bed, a chair and a worktable, and a bathroom cubby and a floating display surface for the feeds.

I’m Murderbot 2.0,

As killware, my onboard storage space would be limited and I remember ART and Me Version 1.0 had been a little worried I’d forget who I was and start randomly attacking stuff.

I was expecting to feel something, like a sense of motion, or to see light streaking by. That’s what would have happened on a show.

But there was nothing.

Then abruptly my existence was all comm code. The suddenness of it shocked me, then I realized this was it, I needed to get moving.

Before I started tearing shit up, I needed to (1) get intel, (2) find out if ART’s crew were here, (3) then figure out a plan to get them out.

Then I found a large recreational lounge with seven inert human occupants.

They had been dumped inside, sprawled on the floor or the couches in positions humans wouldn’t have remained in voluntarily.

Drugs would do this, also stasis fields used for crowd control. Implants, like the ones used on Eletra and Ras, might do it, too.

Result: an 80 percent chance that I was looking at Martyn, Karime, and Turi.

But these three were non-dead and I was getting them back to ART no matter what I had to do.

Now I just had to figure out how.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen other SecUnits since Dr. Mensah bought me, but in this version of me, reality was raw and close to the surface, with no cushion between me and it.

I knew I could take it over if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. Right, so let’s try it this way.

said, I’m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients. I am currently present as killware inside the explorer’s SecSystem.

the last time I’d tried to talk a SecUnit into helping me, it had just gotten more determined to kill me. But it had been a CombatUnit and they’re assholes.)

Eight unidentified humans were forcibly brought aboard by the Hostiles but five disembarked at approximately 2260 ship’s time when we reconnected to the space dock.

The Hostiles implant humans with devices similar to our governor modules. They ran out of unused devices and returned to the space dock to send all humans without implants to the surface.

They had difficulty installing an unidentified object to the explorer’s drive. The bot pilot was deleted and could not assist. Something disastrous happened and it has confused their plans. They needed a weapon to fight against future incursions to this system but the attempt to obtain one failed badly.

the Targets had botched the install of their alien remnant drive onto the explorer’s engines, leaving the explorer no longer wormhole-capable.

Also the group assigned to ART had lost control of it and now a giant armed transport was roaming the system implacably searching for vengeance.

Note: Hostiles have fought among themselves while onboard, suggesting they are split into at least two factions, a situation that can be ...

I just knew it had to be SecUnit 3’s decision. I’ll do that whether you help me or not.

Maybe it would trust me more if it knew me better. I pulled some recent memories from the files

I’d brought with me, edited them together, and added one helpful code bundle at the end. :send helpme.file: Read this.

If it was using the implants to keep the humans immobile, there should be an active connection. But I was going to have to get uncomfortably close to targetControlSystem whose existence on this explorer was so far mostly theoretical.

The buildings were multistory, trapezoidal, made out of a gray material, and arranged in a half circle around a raised plaza in the center where the causeway ended.

They had rib-like supports curving up from their bases that might be decorative, or maybe for power-generating, I had no idea.

Before I could fling myself back through the doors I realized it was an agricultural bot. Its lower body had ten long spidery limbs for moving around without crushing anything, and its upper part was a long curving “neck” with a long head and like I said, covered with spikes.

(Agricultural bots have the statistically lowest chance of accidental injuries but are physically the most terrifying. It’s weird how something designed to take care of delicate lifeforms looks the most like it wants to tear you apart and eat your humans.)

Plants could be engineered to do a lot of things for colonies, like produce gases or other chemicals.

This place

looked simultaneously abandoned but well cared for. Like whatever it was being used for, it wasn’t meant for humans to live in.

I have seen reports claiming that groups compulsively constructing unusual structures is an early symptom of remnant contamination. It could have been built by the Pre-CR colonists, under the influence of the remnants.

But many still had characteristics that made it way more obvious that they were humans who had been physically altered, like body types other than the tall skinny alien chic look of the Targets who had taken over ART.

So this all looked like a big mess but it told me two things: