Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)(7)

I sat there for a while, wanting to go back to the media, any media, rather than think about this. I could feel it in the feed, waiting, watching me with all its attention except for the miniscule amount of awareness it needed to keep itself on course.

Did it really matter if it knew? Was I afraid knowing would change its opinion of me? (As far as I could tell, its opinion was already pretty low.) Did I really care what an asshole research transport thought about me?

I shouldn’t have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn’t let it. If I was going to follow my plan, such as it was, I needed to care. If I let myself not care, then there was no telling where I’d end up. Riding dumb transports watching media until somebody caught me and sold me back to the company, probably, or killed me for my inorganic parts.

I said, “At some point approximately 35,000 hours ago, I was assigned to a contract on RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. During that assignment, I went rogue and killed a large number of my clients. My memory of the incident was partially purged.” SecUnit memory purges are always partial, due to the organic parts inside our heads. The purge can’t wipe memory from organic neural tissue. “I need to know if the incident occurred due to a catastrophic failure of my governor module. That’s what I think happened. But I need to know for sure.” I hesitated, but what the hell, it already knew everything else. “I need to know if I hacked my governor module in order to cause the incident.”

I don’t know what I expected. I knew ART (aka Asshole Research Transport) had a deeper attachment to its crew than SecUnits had for clients. If it didn’t feel that way about the humans it carried and worked with, then it wouldn’t have gotten so upset whenever anything happened to the characters on Worldhoppers. I wouldn’t have had to filter out all the based-on-a-true-story shows where human crews got hurt. I knew what it felt, because I felt that way about Mensah and PreservationAux.

It said, Why was your memory of the incident purged?

That wasn’t the question I was expecting. “Because SecUnits are expensive and the company didn’t want to lose any more money on me than it already had.” I wanted to fidget. I wanted to say something so offensive to it that it would leave me alone. I really wanted to stop thinking about this and watch Sanctuary Moon. “Either I killed them due to a malfunction and then hacked the governor module, or I hacked the governor module so I could kill them,” I said. “Those are the only two possibilities.”

Are all constructs so illogical? said the Asshole Research Transport with the immense processing capability whose metaphorical hand I had had to hold because it had become emotionally compromised by a fictional media serial. Before I could say that, it added, Those are not the first two possibilities to consider.

I had no idea what it meant. “All right, what are the first two possibilities to consider?”

That it either happened, or it didn’t.

*

I had to get up and pace.

Ignoring me, ART continued, If it happened, did you cause it to happen, or did an outside influence use you to cause it to happen? If an outside influence caused it to happen, why? Who benefited from the incident?

ART seemed happy to have the problem laid out so clearly. I wasn’t sure I was. “I know I could have hacked my governor module.” I pointed at my head. “Hacking my governor module is why I’m here.”

If your ability to hack your governor module was what caused the incident, why was it not checked periodically and the current hack detected?

There would be no point in hacking the module if I couldn’t fool the standard diagnostics. But … The company was cheap and sloppy, but not stupid. I had been kept in a deployment center attached to corporate offices. So they hadn’t anticipated any potential danger.

ART said, You are correct that further research is called for before the incident can be understood fully. How do you plan to proceed?

I stopped pacing. It knew how I planned to proceed. Go to RaviHyral, look for information. There hadn’t been anything in the company’s knowledge base that I could access without getting caught, but the systems on RaviHyral itself might not be so well protected. And maybe if I saw the place again, it would spark something in my human neural tissue. (I wasn’t much looking forward to that part, if it happened.) I could tell ART was doing that thing again where it asked me questions it knew the answer to so it could trap me into admitting stuff that I didn’t want to admit. I decided to just skip to the end. “What do you mean?”

You will be identified as a SecUnit.

That stung a little. “I can pass as an augmented human.” Augmented humans are still considered humans. I don’t know if there are any augmented humans with enough implants to resemble a SecUnit. It seems unlikely a human would want that many implants, or would survive whatever catastrophic injury might make them necessary. But humans are weird. Whatever, I didn’t intend to let anyone see more than I absolutely had to.

You look like a SecUnit. You move like a SecUnit. It sent a whole array of images into the feed, comparing a recording of me moving around its corridors and cabins with recordings of various members of its crew in the same spaces. I had relaxed, relieved to be off the transit ring, but I didn’t look very relaxed. I looked like a patrolling SecUnit.

“No one noticed on the transit rings,” I said. I knew I was taking a chance. I had gotten by so far because the humans and augmented humans in the commercial transport rings didn’t see SecUnits except on the entertainment feed or in the news, where we were mostly killing people or already blasted into pieces. If I was spotted by anyone who had ever worked a long-term contract with SecUnits, there was a good chance they would realize what I was.