System Collapse by Wells Martha

Author:Wells, Martha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Okay, the thing I didn’t tell anybody about my right leg getting eaten in the altered memory sequence: I’m 73 percent certain that never happened to me, but there’s an 89 percent chance I did see that happen to a human at some point.

Before I hacked my governor module, I did an initial survey contract on a planet that had many types of extremely hostile fauna. (Initial surveys are the ones where you get all the data that gets written up in the documents that all the later surveys are furnished with so they don’t get killed. Initials should ideally be bot- and drone-only but some surveys go cheap and use humans, sometimes conscripted humans.) The archive of that survey hadn’t been wiped, but I may have deleted portions of it myself. Yeah, so.

Am I making it worse? I think I’m making it worse.

The other thing is, I did not handle the news that I had crashed myself with an altered memory fragment very well. Or at all well.

Can you tell?

“I’ve fucked everything up,” I’d told ART. This was when I was in Medical after my “incident.” Mensah and I had called Amena so she wouldn’t worry (or at least so she would know that I was still alive, even I know that’s important for human children). I told Mensah I wanted to watch media and she had left, and I’d blocked the humans’ comm and feed access to the room.

ART had said, That’s nothing new.

I ignored that because it was just trying to reassure me. If it started being sympathetic it would be terrifying. “Your crew isn’t going to want me to do their security anymore.”

Why is that?

That question was obviously a trap and I should ignore it. It wasn’t as if I could put the answer into words. I was different. It wasn’t just the alien contamination. What came out was, “Something in me broke.”

My wormhole drive is broken.

“That can be fixed,” I said, and knew immediately it was a mistake. ART had been hurt by the Targets’ attack in a lot of different ways. It had been invaded by hostiles and taken over by another system, its memory archives altered. It hadn’t been able to protect its crew. I knew what that had done to it. Wait, no, I didn’t really know. I could only extrapolate based on things that had happened to me. Whatever, it was bad, right? Worse than what happened to me. But I kept talking. “This is happening in my organic nerve tissue.”

Yes, which is why the humans diagnosed it so quickly, ART said. When it happens to them, are they considered disposable?

“That’s what the corporations say.” I should just shut myself down right now, I’m losing this conversation so badly.

Of course ART said, I am not a corporation.

“Stop, stop it. This isn’t you talking, this is just your…” Yeah, I’d walked into that one, too.

My certification in advanced trauma protocol? it said. Of course, that can’t possibly be useful in this situation.

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