Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

(1) the theory about the Targets being colonists who had been exposed to alien remnant contamination was probably correct. (We had been around 82 percent certain of that but it was nice to take it all the way up to 96 plus.)

(2) they had at least two factions who didn’t get along at all. But if ART’s crew had arrived...

A colonist helped us escape when they were transferring us to the space dock’s drop box. We couldn’t—”

“She said it was too late for them. Then she was killed in the dock before I could find out what had happened—”

She just looked more certain. “You’re Peri’s SecUnit.”

So there’s ART, telling all these humans about me.

“It showed you images of me?” What the shit, ART?

(Confession time: that moment, when the humans or augmented humans realize you’re really here to help them. I don’t hate that moment.)

So now I had Seth, Kaede, Tarik, and Matteo in addition to Iris. (They were smart, and had kept the exclamations and arm waving to a minimum when Iris told them I was here.)

(Five was better than none, but I knew how I’d feel if I had to give up three humans. It would suck.)

“The name I call Perihelion is ART, which stands for Asshole Research Transport.” Seth’s grim expression relaxed and Tarik said, “You definitely know the real Peri.”

“Do you have any intel about what happened here?”

“It’s alien remnant contamination.” Kaede looked up at me, her brow wrinkled. “The colonists knew it was here. Adamantine thought the Pre–Corporation Rim colony had sterilized the site, but they were wrong.”

“Apparently the Adamantine colonists started to get sick not long after they got here. Some had physical symptoms—the changes to skin color, weight, eye color. They knew it was alien remnant contamination, so they moved out of the primary site and established a colony on a secondary site further away.”

“Five years ago there was another outbreak of symptoms, but this time it was much worse. Some developed psychological effects, but others didn’t. Some of the affected seem to think they’re part of an alien hivemind.”

“That’s what we think this is about—they’ve formed factions, with the ones who are less affected trying to hold off the others.

“We’re fairly sure the alien hivemind thing is a group delusion.”

(I know, it had been hard enough to give Overse the poppers. But Iris had let a strange SecUnit look at the back of her neck and she was ART’s favorite.)

(In hindsight, this turned out to be another mistake.)

My organic parts went cold. Oh, right. I’d found the original site of the alien remnant contamination.

Being abandoned on a planet + locked up and forgotten with old equipment + no feed access were my top three issues and it was a little overwhelming to have them happen all at once.

(There was no actual pod, just a gravity field that you’re supposed to float up or down in

Instead, the diagram showed the connections, but they came from the dead human body, and formed a weblike mass. It was interwoven with the central system, then stretched out to the walls, following the old connection pathways.

2.0 whispered, That’s targetControlSystem.

There is a lot about what is going on here that I don’t understand. But I am participating anyway.

Two of the Targets exhibit the gray skin on face, hands, and other exposed areas and the other three have blotches of gray on human-normal ranges of skin tones.

We’d assumed the Targets were affected colonists who had built or taken over the targetControlSystem to help them. But it was the other way around.

2.0 said, So it transferred the contamination, or infection, whatever to the humans through their feed interfaces.

It would have gotten to the augmented humans who had their interfaces built into their brains, then used them to infect the humans with external removable interfaces. It hadn’t always been 100 percent effective, which was why a Target aboard the explorer had helped Iris and the others escape,

2.0 added, We were right about the implants, they were just receivers, old Pre-CR tech. And the remnant tech, the thing it put on ART’s drive and tried to install on the explorer. TargetControlSystem told the colonists what to do with them, and it wrote the code for the targetDrones and the protective gear and the sensor deflection.

It must be using the same principle as the machine-readable code written into human DNA that was how things like augments worked, and constructs, and you could transfer malware that way if you weren’t filtering for it …

The Targets sent an infected human carrier aboard—

Two humans! 2.0 corrected. Ras...

I bet the Targets used them to transfer targetControlSystem to ART. That’s why Eletra’s memories were so messed up, it was using her neural tissue as storage space for its kernel.

The alien remnant had forced a contaminated human to bring it within range of the nearest operating system, a pre-CR central system.

TargetControlSystem had spread to the Adamantine systems and colonists. It made them use the Pre-CR tech, because that’s what the Pre-CR central system understood.

But it was still stuck here in the colony, on the terraformed section of the planet. Then the Barish-Estranza contact group had arrived.

The white crystalline substance was grainy, and it grew out of the human’s ears and mouth.

Uh. It was saying the targetControlSystem wasn’t reacting to me because it read my presence as non-hostile. It thought I was a Target, an infected colonist.

Central System sent me an image, a connection map of the room, like the one 2.0 had made. My hard address was on it, and a connection to targetControlSystem.

We’d been doing it wrong. I’d been trying to get ART to avoid contact with potentially infected systems, when it was infected augmented humans we had to worry about.

It would be like having a governor module again. No, not again. Never again.

But it hadn’t really caught on to the fact that 2.0 was in here with me. Or I guess, it didn’t understand that we were two different iterations, with different capabilities. I was losing functionality and about to go into involuntary restart. But 2.0 was fine, and it was killware.

That was ART, and my humans, and humans I had known for maybe five minutes, and a Barish-Estranza SecUnit that 2.0 had randomly found, all cooperating to retrieve me.

You and Amena were right, 2.0 was a person. It wasn’t like a baby, but it was a person.

I thought without 2.0, ART and I would have ended up connected to targetContact and the humans would be speaking Pre-CR languages and trying to off each other for not believing in the alien hivemind.

have completed the removal of the contaminated code and started the process to return your consciousness to your body. While that completes, I have a proposal.

There is an upcoming mission under discussion where your help would be invaluable.

I didn’t know if I trusted ART’s humans or if I even wanted to try. But no one had ever rescued me before except Dr. Mensah,

a lot, for me, considering the whole reason for me/constructs being created was so I/we could be abandoned in an emergency.