Iris said grimly, I don’t know where she’s going with this.
Leonide demanded, “Then why were you repairing the routers?”
“Because humans need routers.” I mean, obviously. Also to fool Barish-Estranza into thinking we weren’t hoping to convince the colonists to evacuate as soon as ART’s backup ships arrived. I couldn’t say that, either.
In background I was running Leonide’s body language through an analysis and it finally threw out some results: indications suggested she was talking to someone else, someone who wasn’t me. It wasn’t just a cultural bias: I’d watched her talk to Arada, this wasn’t the way she normally communicated with other humans. Was she acting this way because I was a SecUnit?
Forcefully, emotion in her voice, she said, “The University needs the routers, to safely record the effects of alien contamination on the trapped population!”
“We don’t need routers for that.” We could do that with pathfinders, if we— Oh shit. “That’s not true. You want to take the population away to indenture them in a mining colony.”
“We’ve offered to transport these people to a viable living situation,” she corrected, making her voice do some emotional throbbing thing like she was upset.
Despite the performance, that was contract language. The Corporation Rim’s legal definition of “viable” covers a lot of horrible territory, I had seen it over and over again in surveys and living conditions in work habitats.
I didn’t know what to say. The research lab thing was true but it would help put the colonists in charge of the planet, to leave or stay however they wanted.
I had the sick feeling that wasn’t going to happen.
Performative emotions, my analysis said. With increasing intensity. Leonide had been performing, all along, but. But I wasn’t the audience. Shit. Oh, shit. AdaCol2’s cameras were active and she was performing to the one ten meters away, giving it her best angle.
Okay, my brain works much faster than a human’s, right? It handles multiple inputs at one time. Especially under emergency conditions, it can be like the humans are moving in slow motion. That was still happening, Leonide was moving in slow motion, but I couldn’t fucking do anything about it. It was like a transport was slow-motion falling on me and no matter how fast I was I couldn’t get out from under it.
ART-drone had access to my results and had come to the same conclusion I had, at about the same second. It said, Iris, SecUnit, I just deployed a targeted burst of interference to disrupt the camera feeds.
Distracted, Iris said, I’m seeing one view from SecUnit’s drone. Is there—
ART-drone said, The cameras installed by the colonists for viewing events in this space. They were watching this.
Iris’s mouth opened but she didn’t say anything, aloud or on the feed.
Ratthi said, But they wouldn’t believe it. Even the most naive corporate would realize Barish-Estranza’s motive—
They aren’t corporates, Tarik said. He leaned back on the bed, like he was exhausted. Their parents and grandparents were corporates.
That media that AdaCol2 had was either Pre-CR or from forty years ago. Their last contact with a corporation was from forty years ago. The adults who were in charge here now had no real idea what the Corporation Rim was like. There were probably older humans here who could tell them, maybe, depending on what that first contamination event at the main colony had done to the group’s general health and life expectancy. But would they listen? Did humans ever fucking listen to anybody—human, augmented human, bot, SecUnit—who was trying to tell them that they were in danger, that their world was about to fall apart?
Leonide had paused, frowning as she listened to her feed. Someone must be telling her the cameras had been cut. She turned and started to walk out.
Okay, now I hated her.
Iris looked furious. SecUnit, I’m sorry, that was my fault. I should have realized what she was doing. I’m going off feed now, I’m going to try to contact Trinh.
This was what Barish-Estranza wanted, this was why they wanted a negotiation. The colony leaders wouldn’t let them make their pitch so they made it this way. They had told the colonists here that the University meant to turn their colonies into a lab experiment and now everything we did and said was suspect. Trying to convince them to go away on ART and other University ships? We could be taking them off someplace to experiment on. B-E would offer an employment contract that would get them off the planet and look great right up until they got to the mines, or were dumped on a barely survivable planet to park it for more development later, or were subcontracted out to something worse.
I walked out of the big chamber into the corridor, and just stood there.
I wanted to kill every Barish-Estranza human here. I could do it.
It wouldn’t help. They would just send more.
We would have to give up, get on the shuttle, go back to the humans we still might be able to save at the main colony. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to save these fucking humans, who hid underground and watched all this media with their kids and had no idea of the kind of danger they were in.
I told ART-drone, We have to make them leave. We can’t let this happen to them.
ART-drone said, We can’t force them. It’s against the University’s charter. It added, It is immoral.
I said, It would be kinder to kill them.
It would not. Not unless they were in physical extremity with no hope of medical intervention, and even then, they would have to agree to it. Would it have been kinder to kill you, before you disabled your governor module?
I said, Yes.
ART-drone said, You know I am not kind.
In the room, Ratthi said, SecUnit, are you all right?
I was so furious, and ART-drone was being stupid, and unfair, and right, and I wanted to smash something, mostly myself. You’d kill them if they tried to hurt your humans. Even having an emotional collapse, I knew saying that meant I’d lost the argument. Once we’d entered “this increasingly unlikely scenario which is not actually occurring in any way makes me right” territory, it was all over.
Of course, ART-drone said. It poked me in the threat assessment module. And what is the probability of that, again, exactly?
It’s such an asshole when it knows it’s winning. Fuck off, I told it. Okay, killing them to save them was the worst idea, I got that, I just wanted to say it, to have some kind of release for the buildup of rage and regret and this … despair at the fucking waste of it. And ART-drone had even ruined that for me.
I wouldn’t give up, I couldn’t. We had to persuade them, I had no idea how. I wish Me 2.0 had survived for a lot of reasons, but specifically right now I wished it had survived because I suspected it would be really good at this. It had persuaded Three to disable its governor module and help it rescue a bunch of humans from the Targets. On TranRollinHyfa, I’d offered to hack a CombatUnit’s governor module and it had just tried to kill me even harder. On RaviHyral I’d hacked a ComfortUnit and turned it loose, and for all I knew it might be out rampaging around wiping out whole stations, but okay, the chances were against that. I’m just saying, this is not something where you can guarantee a result, with humans or constructs.
Me 2.0 had used my private files, something I had never tried before. But Three had made the decision to read the files and to use my code to disable its governor module. It could have made a different decision after that, and killed all the humans the Targets were holding prisoner, instead of retrieving them to take to ART.