I blocked it. You can’t tell anyone I’m here. I expected it to ask me how I had managed to take over its feed, how I had gotten onto the station. I thought I’d managed to anticipate most of the questions and had my answers ready.
It said, But why not? I tell Don Abene everything. She’s my friend.
When I’d called it a pet robot, I honestly thought I was exaggerating. This was going to be even more annoying than I had anticipated, and I had anticipated a pretty high level of annoyance, maybe as high as 85 percent. Now I was looking at 90 percent, possibly 95 percent.
I managed to keep my reaction out of the feed. It wasn’t easy. I said, This has to be a secret, to keep Don Abene and the others safe. We can’t risk anyone finding out about it.
Okay, it said. I wasn’t sure if it was serious. It couldn’t be this easy. Maybe it was just going along until it had a chance to report me? But it said, Promise me Don Abene and all my friends will be safe.
I had the horrible feeling it was serious. I hadn’t expected a bot on ART’s level, but holy shit. Had the humans actually coded it to be childlike, or petlike, I guess? Or had its code developed that way on its own, responding to the way they treated it?
I hesitated, because while I would rather not see a group of humans killed (again), I wasn’t their SecUnit, or even their pretend augmented human security consultant. It’s hard to keep humans safe when you can’t let them see you. But it was waiting, and I wanted it to trust me, and I said, I promise.
Okay. What’s your name?
This caught me off guard. Bots don’t have names, SecUnits don’t have names. (I’d given myself a name, but it was private.) I used the name I’d given Ayres and the others, my poor dumb humans who had sold themselves to a company and by now probably understood just how bad a deal it was. Rin. Security Consultant Rin.
That’s not your real name. I could tell through the feed it was genuinely confused. It doesn’t sound like you.
Obviously Miki was getting more through the feed than I had assumed. That was all I needed. I had nothing prepared for this, and there sure as hell wasn’t anything in my buffer that was remotely helpful. I defaulted to honesty (I know, I was surprised, too) and said, Rin is what I want to be called. I don’t tell anyone my real name.
Okay. I understand, Rin. I won’t tell anyone that you’re here. I will be your friend and help Don Abene and our team.
Right. (I almost said, Okay.) I couldn’t tell if that was a default answer or Miki was making me a solemn promise. Whatever, either it told the humans about me or it didn’t, and if I was going to do this I had to assume it wouldn’t. Can you give me system access to your shuttle? I want to make sure it’s safe.
Okay. And the data came through the feed.
What they were calling a shuttle was actually a local space exploration/transit vehicle, with two levels of crew habitation areas plus a cargo hold that had been converted to bio lab space. It didn’t have the drive to get through the wormhole, but it could go anyplace else around the system. No bot pilot, just the kind of minimal automatic pilot system that I was more used to seeing on atmospheric craft. Not that helpful if everyone capable of operating the ship’s higher-level functions were injured or incapacitated. On the other hand, you couldn’t deliver killware if there was no bot pilot to kill.
The shuttle had no independent SecSystem, either. I had seen on some media from outside the Corporation Rim that internal security was less of an issue there, that the focus was on potential external threats more than it was on policing your own people. I hadn’t thought it was true, but it did mesh in with the lack of interest in monitoring the station staff in their private quarters. Also with the way my PreservationAux clients had behaved. It made me wonder what Preservation might be like, but I squelched that thought. It was probably a boring place where everybody would stare at SecUnits, just like everywhere else.
Miki was giving me full access, so I took a little tour via its memory of previous trips.