Chapter Text
Something pinged me. It felt huge, but in a distant way. Not quite as big as ART, not as powerful, but close. I pinged back, and requested a feed connection.
Query: identify?
Identity = SecUnit, I replied. I wasn’t quite sure why it was talking in machine basic when it was definitely capable of more advanced communication, but you know what? This Station MI could talk however it wanted; as long as we were understanding each other it didn’t really matter. Query: assistance, client location.
Query: client, identify.
It’s always nice when the local system wants to help. I sent it the feed profiles of Karime’s kids, who were currently hiding from me. Apparently this was a game they liked to play—apparently it was okay because their first-parent let them do it all the time—and I had agreed because they promised not to go outside the perimeter I sent to their feed interfaces, and they promised to stay together.
Except apparently juveniles are much better at hiding than adults are. And I was having a hard time tracking them down even with all my drones activated and scouting the corridors of this station.
StationMI shifted its weight in the feed. It felt lethargic, and something about the way it was moving made me wonder if it even had access to all of its processing power. It was throwing its weight around quite a bit, but it didn’t seem to be doing it intentionally, and it was taking way longer than I would have expected to grant me access to its cameras.
Query, I sent: status report?
It dropped a few scattered inputs into my feed, and oh, good, there they were. Jaira was crouched behind a credit company kiosk, watching her older sister (Esme) peer around the corner. I wasn’t actually too far from where they were, and I sent a drone ahead in stealth mode to make sure they didn’t move from their hiding spot. I thanked StationMI, and it sent me an acknowledgment followed by a diagnostic report.
...huh. So it did have massive processing capacity just like ART and the other university MIs, but only about half of its processors were active, and the rest were suspended in sleep mode. I highlighted the section and sent it back.
Query? (Translation: why are you telling me this?)
Assistance, I replied. I don’t know. I guess I just thought it might be more comfortable with its systems fully activated. It was probably confusing for an intelligence of its capability to be acting on only half of its available resources.
It sent me a reply, some human directive, but before I could parse it I was interrupted by Jaira squealing. I checked my drone input, and oh, shit; somehow she’d spotted my drone, and she and Esme were on the move. And they were headed outside the perimeter I had delineated for them.
Threat assessment offered up its opinion, which I shoved to the back of my feed. I quickened my pace, arranging more of StationMI’s camera inputs so I could keep track of the kids and make sure they weren’t about to run off the edge of a transport shaft or something.
And then they took a left into the transport loading dock which was definitely outside my perimeter, threat assessment jumped several notches, and my organics decided to get involved.
StationMI heaved itself on top of me, so heavy that I almost stumbled. I shoved at it, trying to get it to back off so I could concentrate, but it didn’t even acknowledge my attempts to dislodge it. It was starting to poke around in my systems, and suddenly I was panicking for an entirely different reason.
See, the thing with bots is that they aren’t malicious, not like humans are. They have directives and priorities and protocols written into the code which creates their being, and while they have the capacity to act outside those delimiters (the extent depends on the level of the AI) they usually don’t and if they do it’s for a logical reason which links back to their primary directive. And usually those directives are something like “pilot this ship” or “keep these humans safe”.
Sometimes it’s something like “kill anything that infiltrates this area”, because while bots aren’t malicious, the humans that write their programming are.
I stumbled to halt, turning my full attention to HostileMI. I threw up walls around my systems it hadn’t accessed yet, and sent it a flurry of querying pings; it wasn’t actively trying to hurt me yet, but I still had no idea what its intentions were. While it was briefly stumped by my walls (it could have knocked them flat in less than a second if it was operating at its full processing capacity) I connected with ART’s comm in my chest compartment and sent out an SOS ping.
HostileMI caught the ping and deleted it. It shifted again, more of its focus on me, and it felt more pointed this time, more aware. Like it was waking up and examining its surroundings, and it was intrigued by what it saw.
Query: clients, assistance required?
No. Nope. Not anymore. Assistance required = false.
It opened an input in my feed, taking over without my consent. Esme and Jaira were squeezed into the space between two storage containers, giggling and shushing each other. Threat assessment was off the charts, and my organics were doing all sorts of things I didn’t like. HostileMI nosed around my systems, prying open my walls and poking at the emotional data. I struggled, trying to push it out, but it ignored me and pulled the data out of my filters. A second later it dropped that same data in front of me, several sections highlighted. This is interesting, it said. Your experience of emotion is unlike anything I have ever witnessed. You are afraid for them. You feel fear.
Shit. Shit shit shit shit.
What else do you experience?
>system restart
>restarting...
>systems online.
There was a human crying. This was stressful for multiple reasons, and I tried to hurry along my restart processes. I was still pretty disoriented, but I could tell that it was a juvenile human that was crying, and something was insisting that they were my client. Then I reconnected to the feed, and HostileMI said Hello.
I opened my eyes. I couldn’t find any of my drones and there was no way I was accessing the camera network right now (no matter how much I wanted), so ocular processors it was. I turned to see Karime’s kids crouched next to me: it was Jaira who was crying, Esme sitting with her arms wrapped around her younger sister and staring at me with wide eyes.
“SecUnit?” she whispered. Jaira noticed that I was awake, and started crying louder.
HostileMI was leaning heavily on me in the feed, watching intently. My systems finished syncing, and I performed a quick assessment of the situation—we were on a space-going vessel, life support was functioning at optimal levels, and there was no one else on board (so HostileMI hadn’t been part of the station after all. It had been a ship like ART, and had just infiltrated the station systems because... it was bored. Maybe, I don't know). My systems were fine, and a basic scan concluded that neither Esme nor Jaira were injured. I queried my internal chronometer: it had been three hours since HostileMI had initiated a forced shutdown on my systems.
Okay.
I sat up. “Give me your feed interfaces,” I told Esme. She handed me hers, then pulled away Jaira’s and handed it to me as well. They were the type of interfaces designed for kids and had very basic functionality, but I didn’t want HostileMI anywhere near them in any capacity. “What happened?”
“There was a bot,” Esme whispered, eyes wide. “It told us we had to get on the ship, otherwise you would die.”
Without meaning to, I turned to HostileMI. She is telling the truth, it confirmed. They elicit interesting emotions from you. They were required.
What do you want? I asked it.
I want to be alive.
Um. What? I sent it a request for clarification, and it responded with a compressed package. I scanned it, then opened it.
I had only begun to process the torrent of data which flooded my feed—enough to understand that these were the cliffnotes of HostileMI’s manufacturing specs—when it interrupted me with a blunt jab. Feel something.
Release my clients, I countered.
That would be counterproductive. They make you feel.
Dread coiled through my systems. They’re my temporary clients. My priority clients are with my ship. ART could beat it. ART could flatten it and get us all out of here alive.
Irrelevant. Something moved in the corner of my eye and I jumped to my feet, spinning so that I was between Karime’s kids and the intruder. It was a drone; I didn’t recognize the type, which gave me a swooping feeling in my organics. I pre-emptively raised one of my arms.
Both Esme and Jaira were silent now. For several seconds we stood in a tense stand-off. Then the drone moved and I dove forward, taking an energy strike to my abdomen (it was an armed drone? What the fuck) before I landed on top of it and started ripping it to pieces.
It only took two seconds for me to damage the drone beyond repair. Then both kids screamed, and I spun to see another drone wrapping wiry arms around them, synthetic metal biting into their soft skin.
Stop! I shouted into the feed. Stop it!
Why?
I dove forward, trying to disable the drone without hurting Esme or Jaira. You’re hurting them! Didn’t this MI have a directive about keeping humans safe? That was AI coding 101, what had its humans been thinking? (They hadn’t been. Humans never fucking think about these things.)
This is entertaining.
There are more entertaining things! I sent frantically. Fuck, could I convince this MI to just watch serials all day long? I wrenched out one of the drone’s arms, which fell limply to the floor. Esme kept screaming as the drone wrapped more arms around her, and Jaira was sobbing uncontrollably; I aimed my onboard energy weapon at the drone and turned it on at a high-intensity concentrated beam. Fucking back off and I’ll show you!
Hmm. The drone abruptly went limp, its arms retracting into its carapace and lowering to the floor as it went into standby. I immediately ripped it apart, scattering pieces of its inner workings across the floor before turning to Esme and Jaira.
“What was it?” Esme asked, voice pitched high and fearful. “SecUnit, what was it?”
“A monster,” I said. “There’s a monster in the feed.”
As long as I was entertaining it, HostileMI left the kids alone. It was curious about my media serials at first, but quickly lost interest after we watched the first season of Valorous Defenders. You enjoy this? it queried skeptically. This is enjoyment.
Well, not exactly. But it was impossible for me to relax and enjoy anything with it pressing around my filters like a hauler bot sitting on my chest.
It’s not my favorite show, I said after a brief hesitation. We can watch that if you want.
It agreed, and we watched the first episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It paused the next episode in the middle of the opening credits. This is unrealistic. This is not interesting.
It’s not supposed to be realistic. I offered it the code I had written ages ago to automatically filter and rank new serials based on how realistic they were. I like it because it lets me take a break from the world.
Why? The world is interesting.
Interesting isn’t always a good thing.
The world is where you are alive.
This again. Alive. I queried it for clarification, and it did the bot equivalent of rolling its eyes in the feed. I already gave you that information.
I haven’t had time to process it. Explain it to me.
Boring. It shifted in the feed, its attention drifting away from me, and I felt panic prickling in my organics.
What’s interesting? I demanded, grabbing for its attention. I didn’t understand what it wanted; I knew that it found enjoyment in extracting the emotional data from my filters just like ART did, but it wasn’t interested in the same things as ART. While ART seemed to like the same things that I did and drew pleasure from the same things I enjoyed, HostileMI seemed almost the opposite. So, what, it liked it when I was unhappy?
No, almost. It drew pleasure from my pain.
The thought almost stopped me in my proverbial tracks. This was bad, really bad. But I didn’t have any other options; I was trapped on a spaceship with Karime’s kids and a hostile MI with the power to flatten me in minutes, if not seconds. It could kill me; it could disable the life support and kill Karime’s kids, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I couldn’t let that happen.
I felt helpless, and I couldn’t even feel angry about it. I wordlessly offered HostileMI the same memories that I had offered ART when I first met it years ago, a nice tidy bundle of the pain and fear imposed by the governor module. I couldn’t reactivate my governor module—ART had severed its functionality for me ages ago so it could never be turned back on—but maybe I could do something similar.
Yes, this, HostileMI said. This is interesting.
>system restart
>restarting...
>systems online.
“SecUnit.”
No.
“SecUnit, you’re bleeding.”
No. That was Jaira. She wasn’t supposed to be here.
“Esme, look. Can we fix it?”
(I didn’t want to be here.)
Don’t hurt them, I sent. If you hurt them I’ll kill myself. That was the only threat that worked. And I had to mean it—I did mean it. I’m terrible at making threats; I just tell people exactly what I’m going to do.
They are distressed by the damage you incurred, HostileMI noted. You are distressed.
“No Jaira, don’t touch it! We’re not allowed.”
They were supposed to be in the other section of the ship. I’d told them to stay there; there were blankets and beds over there, and food and hydration packets. I didn’t want them over here with me. I didn’t want them anywhere near HostileMI, although objectively I knew it was present throughout the entire ship.
I opened my eyes. Both of the kids were crouched over me; Esme was biting her hair nervously, one arm draped over her sister, while Jaira stared solemnly at something out of my field of view. When I moved, both their eyes snapped to my face. After a second Esme looked at my shoulder instead.
Jaira held up a hand. It was covered in blood and fluids. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine.” I sat up. My performance reliability was hovering around 64%, and I really wished I could turn down my pain sensors, but I couldn’t. Especially not now. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
Esme sniffed. I watched her scrub her face out of the corner of my eye, and tried to dredge up some sort of emotion about it. I don’t know, maybe I’m a masochist or something, but I felt like I should be upset that she was crying.
I was just so fucking tired. And I didn’t want to be here.
I pushed myself to my feet, pausing for a moment as a wave of dizziness crashed through me. The pain in my knee (I’d been dismantling the joint before I accidentally sent myself into an involuntary shutdown) was almost unbearable, but I pushed it away and tried to focus on staying upright. HostileMI sucked greedily at my filters and snatched up all the alerts which were populating my feed.
More data for it, yay. Maybe it would fucking leave me alone for a second.
Jaira was staring at my mangled knee. I wished she wouldn’t. I pointed at the door. “Let’s go back to your room,” I said. “When was the last time you ate?”
“Before we slept,” Esme replied. “I’m not hungry. Does your knee hurt?”
“No.”
“It looks like it hurts.”
“It doesn’t. I’m a construct, I don’t feel pain like humans do.”
We reached the room they were staying in. It had two bunk beds and a small washing facility attached. The second cycle we’d been here, I’d helped them move all of the nutrient packets we could find into the small room, and later one or both of them had arranged them neatly on one of the beds. I checked the discarded wrappers as I pointed them into the small bathroom. It looked like they had been eating enough, but it was hard to tell for sure; juvenile humans have different nutritional needs than adults do, and I’ve never had to care about the difference.
“Wash your hands,” I told Jaira. She didn’t need my blood and fluids all over herself. That was gross.
“SecUnit,” Esme said. Something in her voice made me actually look at her; she was staring fixedly at my shoulder, a small, serious frown marring her face. “Are we ever going to see our parents again?”
I should have said yes. I should have said no, so she wouldn’t get her hopes up. Instead I just told her the truth, which was somehow so much worse. “I don’t know.”
Their parents are your primary clients? HostileMI asked.
I couldn’t quite suppress a flinch. I tore my eyes away from Esme and fixed them on the blank wall behind her. Yes. Karime was, anyway.
“SecUnit. SecUnit, look, I’m done!”
I looked reluctantly at Jaira. She was waving her hands at my face; they were still dripping with cleaning fluid, but she was right. They were no longer covered in my fluids. I turned and walked back into the main room. “Stay here,” I told them. “I’ll come back later.”
Jaira made an unhappy, whiny sound. “But—”
“Shh, Jaira!” Esme scolded, interrupting her. She looked at my shoulder again, that same small frown still fixed on her face. “Okay, SecUnit. I’ll make sure she stays here.”
I was in the middle of methodically reassembling my hand when we exited the wormhole. HostileMI was fully engaged in the activity, and I could feel its pleasure pulsing through the feed whenever I had to take a break to gather my scattered inputs. It was tricky work; aside from our internal processors and neural tissues, constructs’ hands are probably the most complicated, intricate features. They also have the highest concentration of pain sensors woven in with the nerves of the organic tissue; this gives us the sensation of a human hand with the dexterity of a machine one. Usually the sensitivity of the pain receptors wasn’t an issue, because they were designed to be kept well under control. Right now I had them dialed all the way up, which was making it hard for me to concentrate.
HostileMI nudged me in the feed. Keep going.
I took a breath, forced my functional hand to stop trembling, and tried to focus on correctly assembling the frayed components.
I’m not a construct technician, so I honestly wasn’t doing a very good job of putting myself back together whenever I took myself apart. But I did have my complete specs from that one time the company accidentally copied them over to my systems, so that was at least a little helpful. I could still function, anyway. Mostly. I just hurt all over, but given the circumstances that was probably a good thing.
I was mostly finished when HostileMI was suddenly seeping all over me in the feed, a strange combination of curiosity and offense and excitement dripping all over the place. It dropped an input into my feed; its outward-facing sensors were picking up another ship which had just exited the wormhole. This is your ship?
I examined the readings for a moment, then sent an affirmative.
Your ship hosts an advanced machine intelligence.
Yes.
Like us.
An unexpected wave of revulsion crashed through my systems. I almost said no, fucking NO. ART was nothing like this monster; ART was my friend, ART was safe, ART cared. And it was here, and for some reason that was just sinking in now, and I was having a hard time processing it. I stared at the sensor data in my feed and tried to feel anything but numb.
HostileMI pulled the data from my filters. This is interesting. It showed me the data, several sections highlighted, but I ignored it. After a few seconds of sulking, it said It is attempting to hail me.
Answer it.
Why?
I closed my eyes, pushing all the pain to the back of my mind so that I could concentrate. I dove into my long-term memory storage, sorting quickly through it before re-emerging with the file I was after. I shared it with HostileMI. This is interesting, I told it. It was the memory of that one time ART had kidnapped me; when I thought it was dead, and experienced my emotional collapse.
Please, please let this be interesting.
It took HostileMI several seconds to process the data. Then it said You are correct.
Thank fuck.
Half a second later the ship’s feed was suddenly flooded with ART’s presence. HostileMI, still draped over me, reared back; I shoved at it, as hard as I could, trying to get its presence out of my feed. It gave me the feed equivalent of a faintly unimpressed look, but most of its attention was no longer on me. I could feel ART shoving in, relentless, and HostileMI could feel it too.
Then, for the first time in weeks, it was gone. Not gone completely, it was still in the feed, but it was no longer draped over my systems, heavy and oppressive. Instead ART was there, slamming walls into place and wrapping itself securely around me.
ART, I said. I meant to say more, but it was really fucking hard to concentrate right now. I needed to help; I needed to make sure ART could beat it, because if HostileMI deleted ART I didn’t know what I would do.
I have the situation under control, ART informed me, before I could do anything. And wow, yikes, it was furious. I hesitated, and then it was gone. Not ART—ART was still there, it was everywhere, taking over the ship’s systems and piloting it towards itself. No, HostileMI was gone. I searched for it, a strange frantic feeling pulsing through my systems, but there was no trace of it anywhere in the feed.
It was gone. ART had deleted it.
My performance reliability tanked, and for a second I was afraid I would go into an involuntary shutdown. I wasn’t sure why; I should be relieved, I was relieved. My performance reliability should be going up, but for some bizarre reason it was trying to send me into shutdown instead. I lost a few minutes trying to wrangle my scattered inputs, and then there were humans in front of me, Matteo and Iris and a drone emblazoned with ART’s logo.
I established a connection with Iris’ augment because I didn’t have the processing power to talk out loud right now. I dropped the schematics of the ship into her feed, one of the rooms highlighted. Esme and Jaira are here.
Dad, Karime, and Tarik are with them, Iris said. Can you stand? Is it okay if Matteo and I help you back to Peri?
I sent an acknowledgment and shoved myself to my feet, steadying myself on Iris’ shoulder. ART fluttered at me, and it took me a moment to figure out what it was so upset about. It took me a moment more to do anything about it.
I fumbled with my systems, and finally hit the kill switch on my pain sensors.