Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)(22)

The lights shone on a line of metal barricades. Glowing markers had been sprayed on the material, sending out bursts of warning into my feed. Radiation hazard, falling rock hazard, toxic biological hazard. I got the emergency lock to unseal for me and jumped down to the gritty ground. I was scanning for energy signatures and I adjusted my eyesight to be able to see past the bright marker paint. There was a gap three meters along, a darker patch against the metal. It was small but I didn’t have to pop any joints to wriggle through.

I walked down the tunnel to the platform that had been part of the passenger tube access. Farther down there was a set of ten-meter-high doors, big enough for vehicles and the largest hauler bots to maneuver through and for the loads of raw mineral to come out. The passenger access had a cargo unloading rack still extended, and I used it to swing up to the high platform. Everything was covered with a layer of damp dust, which showed no recent tracks. The sealed crates of a supply delivery, with the logos of various contractors stamped on the boxes, still stood stacked on the platform. A broken breather mask lay beside it. My human parts were experiencing a cold prickling that wasn’t comfortable. This place was creepy. I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me.

Somehow that didn’t help.

There wasn’t enough power to move the doors, but the manual release for the passenger access lock still worked. There was no powered light in the corridor either, but the walls were streaked with light-emitting markers, meant to guide everyone out in the event of a catastrophic failure. Some had already failed with age, others were fading. The lack of any feed activity except from the warning paint was vaguely disturbing; I kept thinking of the DeltFall habitat and I was glad I had had ART make the adjustment to my data port.

I followed the corridor into the installation’s central hub. It was a large domed area, dark except for the fading markers on the ground. There were no human remains, of course, but debris was scattered around, tools, broken slivers of plastic, a chunk of hauler bot arm. Openings to corridors, like dark caves, branched off in all directions. I had no sense of having been here before, no sense of familiarity. I identified the passages that led toward the mine pit, then the corridors that went toward the quarters and offices. Branching off from that was the equipment storage.

The emergency power failure releases for the sealed doors had unlocked everything, but whoever had cleaned up afterward had left them shut, and I had to shove each one open. Past the maintenance stations for the hauler bots, I found the security ready room. I stepped in and froze. In the dimness, among the empty weapon storage boxes and the missing floor panels where the recycler had stood, there were familiar shapes. The cubicles were still here.

There were ten of them lined up against the far wall, big smooth white boxes, the dim marker light gleaming off the scuffed surfaces. I didn’t know why my performance reliability was dropping, why it was so hard to move. Then I realized it was because I thought the others were still in there.

It was a completely irrational thought that would have confirmed ART’s bad opinion of the mental abilities of constructs. They wouldn’t leave SecUnits here. We were too expensive, too dangerous to abandon. If I wasn’t locked inside one of these cubicles, the organic part of my brain dreaming, the rest helpless and inert, then the others weren’t here.

It was still hard to make myself cross the room and open the first door.

The plastic bed inside was empty, the power long cut off. I opened each one, but it was the same.

I stepped back from the last one. I wanted to bury my face in my hands, sink down to the floor, and slip into my media, but I didn’t. After twelve long seconds, the intense feeling subsided.

I don’t even know why I’d come in here. I needed to look for data storage, records left behind. I checked the weapons lockers to make sure there was nothing handy, like a package of drones, but they were empty. A firefight had left burn scars on the wall and there was a small crater impact from an explosive projectile next to one of the cubicles. Then I went back toward the offices.

I found the installation control center. Broken display surfaces were everywhere, chairs overturned, interfaces shattered on the floor, and a plastic cup still sat on a console, undisturbed, waiting for someone to pick it up again. Humans can’t work completely in the feed with multiple inputs the way I can, and bots like ART can. Some augmented humans have implanted interfaces that allow it, but not all humans want lots of things inserted into their brains, go figure. So they need these surfaces to project displays for group work. And the external data storage should be tied in here somewhere.

I picked a station, set a chair upright, and got out the small toolkit I had borrowed from ART’s crew storage and brought along in the large side pocket of my pants. (Armor doesn’t have pockets, so score one for ordinary human clothing.) I needed a power source to get the station operable again, but fortunately I had me.

I used the tools to open a port on the energy weapon in my right forearm. Doing it one-handed was tricky, but I’ve had to do worse. I used a patch cord to connect me to the console’s emergency power access and then the station hummed as it powered up. I couldn’t open the feed to control it directly, but I reached into the glittering projection and fished out the access for the Security Systems recorded storage. It had been wiped, but I’d been expecting that.

I started to check all the other storage, just in case it hadn’t been the company techs who had wiped SecSystem. The company wants everything recorded, work done in the feed, conversations, everything, so they can data mine it. A lot of that information is useless and gets deleted, but SecSystem has to hold on to it until the data mining bots can go over it, and so SecSystem often steals unused temporary storage space from other systems.