Chapter Text
"SecUnit, I have something I wanted to bring to your attention."
Dr. Bharadwaj looked worried. More specifically, she looked like she had something to say, but thought that whatever it was would make me upset.
I never know what to do when humans approach me like that. Either they're wrong, which is just insulting, or they're right, and I have to not get mad at stupid humans for knowingly infecting me with an emotion. Though Dr. Bharadwaj wasn't so bad to have an emotion in front of, somehow.
Anyways, what she said next was "I've been tracking all news feeds with topics related to rogue SecUnits for my research."
I had been doing this too, for different reasons. Mostly making sure nobody was talking about me.
"Were you following the rumors about an autonomous Combat SecUnit working with some industrial saboteurs inside the Corporation Rim?" she asked. I noticed that she said autonomous and not rogue this time. If “rogue SecUnit” made humans think of scary media, “rogue CombatUnit” made humans think of scary media with lots of unnecessary closeups on splattering blood and other fluids.
"No," I said, putting as much because I think they're ridiculous rumors so if the conversation was going to be about this can it be over already as I could manage into the one word. We murderbots try to be efficient.
"Well... it sounds like they were true after all. The unit was captured a few cycles ago."
The organic part of my jaw tightened up involuntarily. "Oh," I said. I didn't know why she was telling me this. It wasn't like I could do anything about it. I didn't know what company had manufactured it, but they all had the same policy in this situation. Not just a memory wipe or reprogramming; by now it would have been fully recy–
"Not by its manufacturer or an owner," Dr. Bharadwaj clarified. "By a third party. They claim to have hacked its governor module and are—they're reselling it to the highest bidder." She had my full, media-paused attention now. This wasn't just information you'd find on any open news feed. She must have been doing some serious digging before she even brought this up to me. She must have thought...
She must have thought there actually was something I could do about this. Something we could do.
"SecUnit," she said. "I wanted to bring this to you before I brought it up to Dr. Mensah, or Pin-Lee, or anyone."
A rogue CombatUnit. Humans sometimes had the very mistaken idea that constructs liked/trusted/cared/thought about each other as something other than a threat. But Dr. Bharadwaj knew better than that. And she was still telling me this and letting me make my own decision about it.
I made a decision.
I didn’t say it was a good decision.
* * *
[start file]
Parker: “So Eliot is the fiddle again?”
Nate: “No, Eliot’s not the fiddle. For one thing, the fiddle game has one mark and two accomplices. We need all hands on deck to run the con, so we’re going to have to play the marks off each other.”
Sophie: “Five marks. Isn’t that a bit risky?”
Hardison: “Six, actually. Last minute surprise bidder says they want in.”
Eliot: “Six. How intoxicated were you when you came up with this plan again, Nate?”
Nate: “Only as intoxicated as I was when I planned our last four successful jobs. Eliot.”
Parker: “What’s a fiddle, anyways?”
Sophie: “A musical instrument. Pre-Corporation Rim, mostly. I’ve held one before. Beautiful things…”
Hardison: “I played one. When I was a kid.”
[1.2 seconds silence]
Hardison: “What? You people think I can’t use anything that doesn’t have a feed connection? I can have hobbies. Damn.”
[/end file]
* * *
I befriended/invaded the station SecSystem as soon as we arrived. This station had been chosen as "neutral ground", but even if my humans were from a place as safe/boring as Preservation, they weren't stupid.
(Well, they weren't completely stupid. It still took some shouting before everyone agreed that we would turn around and go right back home without stepping foot off the ship unless I felt completely fucking certain that we weren’t about to be attacked by:
[1] the type of humans that would sell an anonymized no-contract human-passable murder machine to the highest bidder, or
[2] the type of humans that would be the highest bidder for an anonymized no-contract human-passable murder machine.)
I found the transport belonging to our "third party" contacts almost instantly. It was a nondescript black brick of a hauler registered under the name they’d given, "Leverage Shipping", which pretty much confirmed that was a fake shell organization. Or that they were somehow smart enough to crack a combat-grade governor module AND dumb enough to link their dock address to themselves on a public feed while doing secret deals with corporates/terrorists. It’s hard to tell with humans.
I pinged the transport's bot pilot and got a friendly but professional answer protocol which cheerfully identified itself as “Lucille”. (Seriously, sometimes I had to stop and appreciate that my crew didn't do cutesy bot nicknames.) I requested a ship manifest and it reported a five-person crew with no cargo to declare.
So they had disguised their captured CombatUnit as a human crewmember. That thought gave me weird, bad feelings in my organic parts.
To distract myself, I poked around the ship’s firewall. It was strange. Not “alien remnant” strange, but definitely custom written. I sent it a couple fake diagnostic requests just to see what it would do. For 3.4 full seconds it didn't respond, which gave me a weird bad feeling in my non- organic parts. No error codes, no timeouts, just an ominous pause.
Then the bot pilot (I refused to call it Lucille) pinged me back. Nice Try. ProxyTrace: Station Security Origin: False. Provide your real ID or take your con elsewhere.
It wasn’t really speaking, not like ART could, but it still startled me enough I dropped the input and sat up way too fast in my chair which made Overse ask if we had to leave. I waved her off. I needed more information before I made that decision.
Leverage Shipping: Definitely fake and definitely not stupid. Noted.
I checked the port’s video surveillance feeds and found the moment when the Leverage crew had disembarked. The footage seemed unaltered. After my run-in with the bot pilot, that felt like an intentional sign of good faith. As the manifest suggested, five figures stood outside the ship.
The oldest human with the messy dark hair was Captain Ford. The dark-skinned human who seemed to be accessing the feed through his augments and a handheld screen at the same time would be their systems analyst/engineer/hacker. (He was listed in the feed and passenger manifest as "Leland McRodney", which I recognized as the name of the brilliant but volatile engineer from Season 3 of WorldHoppers. I was suddenly glad I'd decided to be Rin instead of Security Consultant Eden for this trip. Most humans don’t spend as much neural tissue on media storage as I do, but you couldn't be too careful. "Leland" seemed young, but not young enough to have gotten the name from a media-obsessed parent. Anyways, the idea of naming a new real human after a human in the media felt like giving a bot pilot a person name. It was just… wrong.)
The pale blonde human listed as “Carroll” wore the uniform of a cargo specialist. She moved strangely, like you sometimes saw with people who had grown up in microgravity. (But she also kept poking the hacker and grinning for no obvious reason. Maybe she was just weird.) The elegant dark-haired human listed only as “Passenger [Gender: Female]” in the crew manifest was clearly a corporate agent of some kind, meaning she was definitely the one actually in charge.
That left “Security Consultant Spencer [Gender: Male]” as my totally-not-a-CombatUnit.
I paused the feed to just stare for a while. They wanted “him” to pass as human, so it wore no armor. Just nondescript long sleeves that would hide its inorganic parts from anyone who didn’t have firsthand knowledge of the specific annoying ways that recycler fabric wrinkles along the edges of chest panels and forearm energy weapon ports. (Meaning: Anyone who wasn't me.)
It had long hair. Not just long by SecUnit standards, but actually all the way down to the shoulders. I knew firsthand how slowly constructs’ hair grew, even with a modified configuration. The hair had to be its own decision from its time as a rogue. That thought gave me more uncomfortable organic-parts feelings.
I unpaused the feed. Since I knew what I was looking for, I could see how perfectly still it stood, how nobody in the group looked at it when they spoke, how its eyes tracked passersby with the blank concentration of a Threat Assessment module in overdrive. But its physical configuration didn’t match any of the Combat/SecUnit models that I had on file.
I wasn't sure if this was good or bad news. My own Threat Assessment module had been screaming at me from the start that this unit’s original manufacturers could arrive at any moment to clean up after themselves. (Translation: To kill all sellers/bidders/potential witnesses.) If the corporation couldn’t recognize their unit, then we might be safe. (From that particular scenario, anyways. Threat Assessment had a long and cheery list of other ways this deal could end badly.) But if they recognized their model before I even knew who I had to be watching out for, we'd all be—to use the proper security consulting terminology—utterly fucked.
I was tagging an image of the group with some observations to send to Dr. Bharadwaj and the others when my performance reliability dropped a solid percentage point in shock. On the video feed, cargo specialist Carroll had reached up and casually patted the CombatUnit on the arm. An expression of worry flashed across the hacker’s face, and the captain quickly pushed her hand back down. Then it was over.
Well, holy shit. Carroll might actually be insane even by human standards.
I had to replay the moment a couple of times to feel sure it had really happened. In my non-rogue SecUnit days, I was used to being treated like an appliance. But an appliance like a mining drill, where the humans never quite forget that you’re one flipped bit away from tearing them into pieces like tissue paper. The Leverage humans… they seemed about as afraid of their CombatUnit as they would be of a kitchen appliance. (Even if it was one of the kitchen appliances with the little spinning blades.)
That seemed like a terrifyingly stupid amount of faith to have in a governor module hack. Especially on a unit that had by all accounts been a successful rogue for years. I wasn’t even sure I would have been able to identify it as a CombatUnit if I hadn’t already known. Even with the very distinctive behavioral patterns, it really did look like you might if you were a ridiculously augmented human with a governor module shoved into your brain.
Unless…
Oh, fuck.
Fuck, fuck, I really, really hoped I was wrong about that.
I forced that thought aside for now. I still had a couple of other bidders to make absolutely sure weren't waiting in the wings to murder us (or the Leverage humans, for that matter). But I’d already made one decision: Whether or not I let my humans get off this ship, I was going to go to that damn meeting.