On the feed, Ratthi checked my scan of the metal’s composition. He said, That screen doesn’t look Pre-CR.
Right, and that, too. Big clue there, Murderbot, you might want to notice things like that.
Could have been the terraforming crew, Tarik said. They must have explored this place.
On the other wall of the foyer, my scan found some metal plates with inscribed writing. It didn’t match anything in the language module Thiago had written to communicate with the Targets and colonists, so it was likely yet another Pre-CR language. I made sure I got good images and sent stills to Ratthi to tag for later, once we got out of blackout. Without access to ART’s enormous archive storage and Thiago’s translation abilities, we weren’t going to be able to read it.
I walked to the front of the foyer. (In the shuttle, Ratthi whispered, “I hate this part.” He and Tarik and Iris watched the display surface intently, frozen except for the way Tarik kept pinching his lip compulsively.) I could just see the ramp that stretched out and down. Three stories down, according to ScoutDrone2. It was like the ramp at a transit ring, cutting back and forth down the wall to keep its angle gentle. There was nothing else I could really see from this point; the space was too big and dark. (I could turn on my helmet light, but it would make me a great target, if a hostile had detected my entrance. Which, if I were a human hiding up here in isolation and a stranger walked in suddenly in an unfamiliar brand of environmental suit, I’d shoot at me.) (Okay I wouldn’t, but then I’m not a human who was panicking about getting murdered or whatever.)
(I’m a SecUnit who was panicking about getting murdered or whatever by panicking humans.)
I started down the ramp. It helped that ScoutDrone2 was down there bumping into walls. I let it continue to wander; it had found five other corridor entrances by this point, but hadn’t picked up any traces of artificial light like ScoutDrone1.
From what I could tell, this space was a lot like that central area of the other Pre-CR site: a large multilevel space with corridors leading off it, though it wasn’t as tall. (And yes, I know that’s not a wildly unusual design for the majority of human cultures.) I wasn’t picking up any sense of air movement, except what was being caused by my own drones, and audio was null. (I’d backburnered the shuttle comm channel, which at the moment was three humans breathing tensely, plus the occasional creak of seat upholstery.)
I found little domed bumps on the floor, my scan picking up the dormant tech inside each one. They were simple beacons, probably marking vehicle parking/landing zones. The hangar had been intended for larger craft; this area could be meant for small aircraft or cargo lifters or vehicles that would travel the tunnel, hopefully with more safety features than the jury-rigged one we had found. ScoutDrone2 had just encountered a foyer leading to a small set of rooms with plumbing attachments and drains, probably a restroom.
This place wasn’t as creepy as it had been at first. It was also, weirdly, way easier to walk around in here than it had been to step through the hatch. I tapped my private feed connection with Ratthi and said, Can you burn out your ability to feel that a place is creepy?
Ratthi answered, I think that’s called being in shock.
Thanks, Ratthi. If I wanted someone to ruin my fun, I’d have asked ART-drone.
I reached the bottom of the ramp and headed toward the corridor ScoutDrone1 had found. The floor was smooth underfoot and I could see just well enough not to trip on anything.
Then ART-drone said, I’m picking up a nonstandard transmission.
I froze.
So here is the thing. The redacted thing. I should tell you about it, or this isn’t going to make sense.
Twelve plus hours after the new Barish-Estranza explorer arrived in the system, something happened. I don’t have a memory of what triggered it, except maybe in my organic neural tissue which is no fucking help at all.
I was in the control area below ART’s bridge with the humans, going over plans for dealing with Barish-Estranza since our strategic situation had just blown up in our faces. I can access that moment and see what I was paying 87 percent of my attention to: Iris explaining how the University normally handled evacuating colonists and how those options might work or need to change in this situation. Mensah and Ratthi were sitting in chairs listening to her, Pin-Lee was standing, staring at nothing while she scrolled through legal documents in her feed. The rest of ART’s crew were scattered around the compartment, quiet because they were listening or hurriedly pulling information from their feeds and ART’s archives so they could present potential solutions. Arada, Overse, Amena, and Thiago were on the Preservation responder, listening in on comm with some of the other crew. I had my drones in standby, and Three had just been coaxed by Matteo to sit on a couch.
My next functional memory was a forced restart in ART’s medical bay.
ART had to get into my archive and processes to see what had knocked me offline. Apparently, I’d had what appeared to be a visual memory of what happened under the Pre-CR habitat, with the infected human corpse and all that. When ART showed it to me after restart, I could tell some of it was inaccurate. (Really inaccurate. The human corpse did not catch me and eat my right leg. For one thing, there’s not a lot of organic tissue on there to eat, for the other, we had video confirmation that I still had it after the escape.)
The original memory wasn’t corrupted, it was still intact for comparison, and there were other anomalies in the new memory once ART ran an analysis of both. There was no indication of where the inaccurate memory had come from or what had caused it to show up in my archive. I hadn’t been hacked, ART hadn’t been hacked, the Preservation Responder hadn’t been hacked, our feed networks hadn’t been hacked. We ran a check of my media storage to make sure that the memory wasn’t a corrupted clip from a show. It turned out there was a (not surprisingly) large percentage of my media that included scenes of humans, augmented humans, bots, humans and/or bots pretending to be aliens, and animated and/or machine-generated images of aliens, being chased by scary things. But none of the files were corrupted and none included the accurate details present both in my original memory and the false version.
Whatever caused the false memory to spontaneously appear out of fucking nowhere, it had made my performance reliability drop so quickly that I shut down, variously upsetting and freaking the humans out. Their hypothesis, as delivered by Dr. Mensah in Medical after I was online again, was that it was like what happened when a human had a flashback. And because no one had any information at all on the effects of trauma on a construct’s machine/organic neural combo, the MedSystem hadn’t recognized it for what it was until ART got into my activity logs and rummaged around.
Mensah was upset that it had happened though she was pretending not to be. (And we both straight up lied to Amena, over the comm to the Preservation responder, and told her I was still having functional issues due to the repairs necessitated by the viral contamination, and it was nothing to worry about, nothing at all, ha-ha. Yeah, I don’t know if she believed us or not, our consensus was that we made a shit job of it.)
But it happened in front of eleven humans, Three, and ART, and by the time they and ART figured out it was not some kind of viral attack, or a new contamination outbreak, there was no chance to keep it private and everybody who had been present knew I’d borked myself over a weird anomalous faulty memory that I had apparently created myself, somehow. Not exactly a confidence builder.