(They were all so nice about it. The whole thing made me understand the human expression “it made me want to vomit.” Why would you ever want to do something that was so objectively disgusting and looked so painful. Oh, this was why, I get it now.)
I unfroze to the scene from Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon when the solicitor is waking up in the medical bay and her bodyguard is there. It’s from episode 206, one of my favorites. Time check: offline = .06 seconds. If this had happened during an attack by hostile(s), I’d be dead now and the hostiles would have probably destroyed ART-drone and attacked the shuttle and killed all the humans.
ART-drone had not ratted me out and Iris was in the middle of saying, “—possible contamination hazard?” on the comm. ART-drone had already taken our feed down in case it was a contamination hazard, which was good. I could see on my shuttle drone’s camera that Ratthi had pulled his interface out of his ear.
ART-drone said, Viral contamination cannot be delivered to me or SecUnit via this method. I have already blocked the shuttle’s feed and comm from receiving the potentially hostile channel. On our private feed, it said, Are you back?
Yes, I told it. Sort of, mostly. Was it that memory again?
You showed the same performance reliability drop and error codes, but the duration was comparatively short, and you didn’t go into shutdown. So it’s more likely to be a variation on the same issue. We can’t verify that until I have time to check your active logs.
Iris asked, “Can you show us the transmission?”
ART-drone converted the transmission into visual data that the humans could understand and put an image of it on the shuttle’s display surface.
Begin session acknowledge greeting
Begin session acknowledge hello
Begin session acknowledge salutation
Ratthi’s brow was doing things to show simultaneous intense worry and intense interest. “It’s an automated system, do you think?”
“No, it’s an active system trying to initiate a connection with either Peri or SecUnit.” Iris bit her lower lip in a way that looked like it hurt.
Correct, ART-drone said. It knows we’re here. It must be continuously scanning for activity and picked up our comm and feed signal.
Tarik said, “You think this is like that Pre-CR central system?”
I could talk now, so I answered, “Yes, like that.” Like the other central system we had found, this one was using LanguageBasic, which is still common in the Corporation Rim for connection protocol between different architectures using different and often proprietary codes. It was invented in the Pre-CR times, I guess. I have no idea.
“Is it a distress call?” Ratthi was really concerned. So was I. Because it wasn’t a distress call.
Begin session acknowledge hand-clasp
Begin session acknowledge wave
Begin session acknowledge bow
ART-drone said, No, this is not a distress call. It is cycling through alternate data transfer protocols until it finds one we will accept.
The other Pre-CR central system had not infected me with the alien contamination. The other Pre-CR central system had, with 2.0’s help, in fact saved my ass. It had been sitting in that place, contaminated and cut off from its network, calling into the dark for someone, anyone, to help its humans, until we found it.
I did not want to answer this one. I also did not want my stupid neural tissue or whatever was causing my stupid repeating false memory error to win. Win what? That’s a good fucking question, I wish I could answer it. I said, “Iris, I want to answer it. Do I have a go to proceed?” Because if this turns out to be a really bad idea, it wasn’t going to be just me in the shit. I was really glad I’d made them stay in the shuttle, with one of ART’s iterations piloting, far enough away to get in the air before, say, a running contaminated human or bot could reach them. But that wasn’t me being especially smart, it was just me not being especially stupid.
Ratthi was clearly not happy. Tarik’s face set in a wince, anticipating disaster. Iris bit her lip again, then said, “Go, at your discretion.”
ART-drone said, We will be out of contact briefly. Confirm.
Iris has that same thing as Dr. Mensah, the thing where she’s able to look and sound calm under circumstances where shit is possibly about to go down. She said, “Confirm. See you on the other side.”
ART-drone cut the comm and I missed them immediately. It wasn’t like the humans could do a lot to help me in this situation if everything went sideways, but not having them there was not … It was not great. (It was tempting to take this as another sign of possible performance dysfunction, but objectively I knew it was probably the opposite.) (It was still annoying.)
ART-drone threw out an extra comm- and feed-block wall between us and the shuttle and I said, Let’s do full containment protocol. Which was the protocol we’d come up with (we being ART, Martyn, and Matteo and me, before my incident when I effectively became useless) for dealing with potential contamination situations.
Let’s, ART-drone said, which was its way of being nice and not letting me know that it didn’t need my advice about which containment protocol to use. Then it made it worse by adding, Be careful.
The wall went up and I was alone in the dark except for my two drones, both on standby now, and the Pre-CR system.
Begin session acknowledge hail
Begin session acknowledge salute
Begin session acknowledge nod
I sent, Acknowledge, session.
There was no pause, like it had no concerns about contact with foreign systems. It sent, Connection: ID: AdaCol2. Query: ID?
Okay, this is going to be tricky. ID: SecUnit.
Function: query? Registration/organization: query?
The other central system had been altered to work for the Adamantine colonists who had found it in the Pre-CR structure. This one must have been altered, too, because of its designation. (Ada = Adamantine; Col = Colony.) (I’m guessing the other central system was AdaCol1, unless there was a whole other Pre-CR network still active on this planet.) (I really hope there isn’t.) But this system didn’t sound like it had been altered, and I can’t describe that any better without copying in a lot of code. But that other system, AdaCol1, had sort of gotten what I was; this one had no clue. The concept of me was not in its archive, if it even had archives like I did.
I responded, Function: survey. Organization ID: PSUMNT.
Trying to explain what a SecUnit was in LanguageBasic was hard enough, and the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, since it hadn’t existed back when this code was in common use, had no ID that AdaCol2 would even recognize as an ID, so I just made one up for it.
It didn’t respond. Yeah, I think I fucked that up.
It sent, ID: PSUMNT added to ContactBase.
I guess machine intelligences of that era were too polite to say “that sounds fake but okay.”