I asked ART, Can you hack it from here?
There was a half-second pause while ART explored the idea. ART answered, No, I can’t secure the connection here. It could stop me by cutting off its feed.
I told the sexbot, Your client wants to kill my client.
It didn’t reply.
I said, You told Tlacey about me. It must have recognized what I was during that first meeting. If it hadn’t been sure, seeing the damage I had done to the three humans Tlacey had sent would have been all the confirmation it needed. I was seething, but I kept it out of the feed. As I told ART, bots and constructs can’t trust each other, so I don’t know why it made me angry. I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case. I said, Your client sent a ComfortUnit to do a SecUnit’s job.
It countered, She didn’t know she needed a SecUnit until today. It added, I told her you were a SecUnit, I didn’t tell her you were a rogue.
I wondered if I could believe that. And I wondered if it had tried to explain to Tlacey the impossibility of this assignment. What do you propose to do?
There was a pause. A long one, five seconds. We could kill them.
Well, that was an unusual approach to its dilemma. Kill who? Tlacey?
All of them. The humans here.
I leaned against the wall. If I had been human, I would have rolled my eyes. Though if I had been human, I might have been stupid enough to think it was a good idea.
I also wondered if it knew a lot more about me than what little was in the newsburst.
Picking up on my reaction, ART said, What does it want?
To kill all the humans, I answered.
I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function. If there were no humans, there would be no crew to protect and no reason to do research and fill its databases. It said, That is irrational.
I know, I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say.
Huh.
I said to the sexbot, Is that how Tlacey thinks constructs talk to each other?
There was another pause, only two seconds this time. Yes. Then, Tlacey believes you stayed behind to steal the files for the tech group. What did you do for so long in the feed blackout area?
I was hiding. I know, not my best lie. Does Tlacey know you want to kill her? Because the “kill all humans” thing might have come from Tlacey, but the intensity under it was real, and I didn’t think it was directed at all humans.
She knows, it said. Then I didn’t tell her about your client, she thinks they all left on the shuttle. She only wanted me to follow you.
A code bundle came through the feed. You can’t infect a construct with malware like that, not without sending it through a Sec or HubSystem. Even then I would have to apply it, and without direct orders and a working governor module, there’s no way to force me to do it. The only way that code can be applied without my assistance is through a combat override module via my dataport.
It might be killware, but I was not a simple pilot bot, and it would mostly just annoy the hell out of me. Maybe to the point where I tore a door off the wall and ripped the head off a ComfortUnit.
I could just delete the bundle, but I wanted to know what it was so I knew how furious to get. It was small enough for a human’s interface to handle, so I shunted it aside to Tapan. I said aloud, “I need you to isolate that for me. Don’t open it yet.”
She signaled assent through the feed and pulled the bundle into her temp storage. The other thing about killware and malware is that they can’t do anything to humans or augmented humans.
The sexbot hadn’t said anything else and I sent a ping in time to feel it withdraw its feed. It was walking away down the corridor.
I waited until I was sure, then stepped back from the door. I debated staying here, or moving Tapan. Now that I knew something was hacking the security cameras to watch me, I could use countermeasures. I probably should have been doing that from the beginning, but you may have noticed that for a terrifying murderbot I fuck up a lot.
“It’s gone,” I told Tapan. “Can you check out that code bundle for me?”
She got that inward look that humans have when they’re deep in their feed. After a minute, she said, “It’s malware. Pretty standard … Maybe they thought it would get your augments, but that’s kind of amateurish for Tlacey. Hold it. There’s a message string in here, attached to the code.”
ART and I waited. Tapan’s face did something complicated, settling on worry. “This is weird.” She turned to the display surface and made the completely unnecessary gesture that some humans can’t help doing when they send something from their feed to display.
It was the message string, three words. Please help me.
I moved us to a different room, near an emergency exit, in another section of the hostel. The sexbot might be alert for hacking, so I removed the access plate, manually broke the lock, and replaced the plate again while Tapan watched the corridor. Once we were inside, I told Tapan some of what the sexbot had said, mostly the part about how it claimed Tlacey didn’t know Tapan was here. (I didn’t tell her our visitor had been a sexbot because Tlacey had figured out what I was and didn’t want to waste any more human bodyguards on me.) “But we don’t know that that’s true, or that this operative won’t tell Tlacey you’re here now.”
Tapan looked confused. “But why did they tell you anything?”
That was a good question. “I don’t know. They don’t like Tlacey, but that might not be the only reason.”
Tapan bit her lip, considering. “I think I should still try to keep the meeting. It’s only four hours from now.”
I’m used to humans wanting to do things that can get them killed. Maybe too used to it. I knew we should leave now. But I needed time to hack enough of the security system to get past the sexbot. Once I did that, it seemed wrong not to wait the short time to make the meeting, which Tapan was reasonably sure Tlacey didn’t know about. Reasonably sure.
It was probably a trap.
I needed to think. I told Tapan I was going to sleep for a while and laid down on my side on my section of padding. My recharge cycle isn’t obvious but it doesn’t look like a human sleeping, so what I was actually going to do was play some media in the background of my feed while I worked on my security countermeasures and looked up my old module on risk assessment.
Thirty-two minutes later, I heard movement. I thought Tapan was getting up to go to the restroom facility, but then she settled on the pads behind me, not quite touching my back. I had set my breathing to sound deep and even, like a human sleeping, with occasional random variations to add verisimilitude, so the fact that I had frozen in place wasn’t obvious.
I had never had a human touch me, or almost touch me, like this before and it was deeply, deeply weird.
Calm down, ART said, not helpfully.
I was too frozen to respond. After three seconds, ART added, She’s frightened. You are a reassuring presence.
I was still too frozen to answer ART, but I upped my body heat. Over the next two hours, she yawned twice, breathed deeply, and snorted occasionally. At the end of that time I changed my breathing and moved a little, and she immediately slid off my pad and over to hers.