Chapter Summary:

Nine makes a giant mistake. It tries to talk to a human.

~~~

I located Mandali in the extra equipment room. I scrubbed through historical data and found she brought her key with her everywhere, even to the toilet. She didn't leave it unguarded, except when she put it in a locked box next to her bunk while she slept.

Risk assessment wanted me to wait until she fell asleep to steal her access but she slept in a standard bunk in the same room as everyone else on her shift. It even said it would take me under three seconds to pick various locks to get what I wanted. But I didn't want to. I could rationalize it: I didn't have a bunk, so if I got caught, either while people were shuffling in/out, or because someone (Mandali herself) was a light sleeper—well, I'd send Cyan for a job like that. But I could tell it was rationalizing. Something about being in a bunk room repelled me and I didn't really know why. Or care. I wasn't going to do that.

Weirdly, risk assessment said the second best option was to talk to her. Then she would be able to let me into the proprietary area.

I configured my feed ID to read Name = Anghen; Gender = N/A; Social Credit = 108. (A GiDeon social credit score of 108 out of 216 was exactly average.)

I had chosen the cover story of an external contracted maintenance worker because the crew would recognize that I wasn't a regular employee but I could still talk about maintenance until their eyes glazed over. Also, I wouldn't look like a psychopath if someone spotted me in the maintenance tunnels. It was therefore the perfect (acceptable) cover.

I looked at surveillance footage near my location and observed a human move toward the cargo bay from the habitation area. The easiest thing to do was let them open the door for me.

I put the information away. The human was near the door. As I ran upstairs, I downloaded Moiety's crew list and identified the human as an inventory specialist.

I prepared a script with job-related small talk.

The human opened the door from the other side. They said, "Oh. Hi!"

I said, "Hi, how are you?"

"Good, thanks." The employee held the door open for me without asking a single question.

"Thanks!" I said. I entered the hallway that led to the habitation area.

Huh, a break-in that only required saying hi. I hadn't even needed my script or my lock picking tools.

I went through the first door on my right. It was a maintenance shaft.

I crawled through the cramped space. I watched the surveillance footage as I descended the ladder.

Mandali jumped up to get something that looked like an artificial pack of fruit or something. I've seen humans kill for that stuff. (Only metaphorically. So far.)

I scrubbed through the security footage. Mandali had entered the secured room/vault where Cyan was stored earlier that cycle. On her way out, she stored her access key in her front pocket. In order to steal the code, I just had to touch her pocket.

When I emerged from the maintenance tunnel, humans all looked at me but they went back to eating. I would have guessed they'd recognize that I was new, but I guess no one cared about anything. It was hard for humans to care when they worked 14-hour shifts for 30 cycles in a row, or more.

There were a lot of chewing sounds. I wished I could run my anti-mouth sounds filter in real life, not just on media. The soundscape was disgusting. I at least bumped up my music volume so that I wouldn't have to hear it as much.

The Moiety map confirmed I was in a decommissioned equipment room, so it was weird to eat here. Whatever. I spotted a defunct ComfortUnit repair cubicle but no SecUnit repair cube. So I guess my shoulder would have to wait.

~~~

[Footnote 5: Not that a Deontologic or GiDeon repair cubicle would be much help anyway. I'd been designed (by GiDeon) as a Barish-Estranza SecUnit. GiDeon had rigged their own B-E cube for me when I had to be onsite for memory purges. They would have dismantled the custom equipment after I exploded. It counted as evidence.

/End of Footnote 5.

~~~

I spotted Mandali with my organic vision. She saw me, too. I smiled.

(A handler had once told me that I was "unrecognizable" when I smiled. That kind of feedback was, um, well.)

She came over to hug me. I hugged her with my left arm and with my right hand I touched her pocket to steal her key before I looped my arm around her back. I did it in one fluid motion so that it wouldn't be obvious. "It's so nice to see you," I said, still smiling.

We chit-chatted for a little while. Since she already knew me from the social feed, she didn't seem too suspicious about my being aboard Moiety. It was a small crew and they all knew each other.

While we talked, I noticed a locked door with physical access to HubSystem. The door was dusty from disuse but I recognized the lock brand. It would be trivial to pick the lock. Even a beginner could do it.

I suspected that the lock was only there to dissuade employees from climbing the million rungs of the ladder to physically tamper with HubSystem, at the heart of Moiety in zero-gravity. I mean, the lock looked pretty intimidating if you knew nothing about security, but beneath the veneer it was cheap and hardly worked. Sort of like me.

I was friendly, but she sent a query to her supervisor, someone named Corey Bailer. I squashed the communication and sent a fake acknowledgement.

She held me at arm's length. "I have so many questions!" she said.

"Me too," I said. "But I'm working now. Maybe after my shift ends?"

"Okay," she said pleasantly. "Just one question before you leave."

"Sure," I said.

Mandali glanced at the other people in the room, then she looked back at me. She said, "How long have you been a stowaway?"

Shit, fucking shit. I had completely forgotten to add myself to the Moiety crew list.

I laughed, still in character. It was reflexive. When I realized she wasn't joking, I did my best emphatic denial, like I was offended she'd accuse me of something I didn't do. "I'm sorry, a stowaway?"

There was at least one human who was listening to our conversation, over their shoulder, and pretending not to.

I dipped into the cargo/ crew list and made it look like Anghen had boarded at the previous port of call, but I made it look like Anghen also had a job on Moiety.

Mandali had downloaded a copy of the crew list to her interface. I gently rode the feed connection to change that one, too.

"You heard me," Mandali said.

I understood what had gone wrong: I'd added myself to the list at Tar-Brea Depot but neglected the ship. I'd already hacked a crew list and hadn't bothered to double-check if my preparation was relevant to Plan C-0. (Memory is weird.) If someone else had been around to help I wouldn't have overlooked such an obvious detail.

I scoffed. "Did you check the crew manifest?"

I let my gaze travel inward like I was a human accessing the feed through an internal interface. I added myself to the repair schedule in the proprietary area and created security clearance for myself.

"I'm not sure what you mean. I'm on the manifest," I said.

"Oh," Mandali said. Her gaze lingered on me and I did my best to look confused.

"Maybe it hadn't updated in time," I said. Humans never updated data on time.

With null emotion, Mandali said, "I must seem crazy."

She kept staring at me like she knew exactly what I had done. Hm, not good.

I said, "I need to get to work now."

I retreated to the hall. I almost tripped over a crate full of mixing blades for chemical machinery that had been left in the middle of the walkway. I kicked it to the side.

She followed.

Why was she following me?

Maybe I should just leave. Clearly this had been a trap.

I checked risk assessment and the possibility that Cyan was not aboard Moiety at all had begun a steady climb from 7%. Maybe only its transponder was aboard and its body had been recycled a long time ago.

I kept moving.

I crashed out the door at the end of the hall. I flew down the steps two at a time.

No, they wouldn't set a trap this elaborate. Would they? They hadn't caught me while I'd run around the Corporation Rim inside the cloaked vehicle. (I hadn't known what I was doing, so they wouldn't know either.) But if they knew that I might target Moiety to get Cyan back, then they could configure a signal device to hit the transponder in my neural tissue without me realizing it. Then Mandali would know that I wasn't part of the crew and everything I'd said was a lie.

I turned my attention to risk assessment's most probable explanation for events. Such an elaborate trap was unlikely given the Deontologic work culture and them not knowing that I gave a shit about the ComfortUnit specifically. It reported that Mandali thought I was a human stowaway, not a SecUnit or a corporate spy or whatever. (Which is at least partially correct. I'm not a spy.)

So the idea that it was a trap was paranoia. Maybe. (Or is it my intuition? My handlers had always said intuition keeps operatives alive.) Or maybe risk assessment would report that this wasn't a trap because that's what the corporation would want. They would want rogues to think—Okay, yeah, I sounded paranoid.

I had to move past the locked door anyway, so I jammed my fingers into the key gate again. I entered the code I'd seen Mandali enter to get in.

The door clicked open. With an experimental touch, I pushed the door open.

I searched through the footage. Mandali had hesitated at the door above the stairs. I could tell she was listening on the feed.

I had a choice. I looked out to port. Assuming that this wasn't a trap (considering how much work I'd had to put in to figure out Cyan's whereabouts, I assumed that it wasn't), I had a clear path to freedom. I could save myself.

I'd never be able to live with myself if I didn't confirm Cyan's status. And if it was dead, at least I'd know I'd have to figure out who to kill next.

I went in.

The air cycling thundered above me. I turned down my hearing again. Fans with blades the length of my body pushed massive quantities of air through a maze of pipes to keep the proprietary cargo section under negative air pressure.

I closed the door behind me.

The stench of acid was even stronger amidships. To my right, huge tanks of acid towered in neat rows. A human and compact mixer bots milled around. Lifter bots sat at the end of the long room.

To my left, drums of liquid chems and palettes of dry powder lined the wall. Some of the acid tanks had started to corrode and bulge, but Deontologic was still storing them at maximum capacity.

Well, that was an unacceptable safety risk. Since I was familiar with the corporation's internal procedures anyway, I placed an order for new tanks and charged GiDeon.

There were some humans inside the vault who looked at me curiously, so I climbed a ladder up to the loud part of the Flammables storage area. I pretended to inspect the built-in fire suppression system. It contained a mixture of different halons, but it didn't say which. Maybe the company considered the mixture proprietary.

(The halon system looked pretty shitty, by the way. There was visible evidence of corrosion.)

I used my new vantage point to triangulate Cyan's location. I found it, weirdly inside the pile of Inhalation Hazard.

The humans got bored of watching me, so I climbed down the ladder.

There, under some packs of dry powder. The packs said VC and had the word "inflammable" in marker paint. "Inflammable" was a stupid word and it should have probably been a fire symbol, not an ambiguous word in a language that the user might not be able to read. Provided that they could read at all.

(It's weird and confusing that "inflammable" means the same thing as "flammable." It's like how "inhabitable" and "habitable" are the same so uninhabitable is the opposite. Uh, where was I going with this?) (Mark save-for-later: uninflammable?)

I cross-referenced the cargo manifest and the safety information matching the inflammable warning. The packs labeled VC were actually just Inhalation Hazard again under a different name.

[Footnote 6: So, yeah. I didn't know any of the real chem names even as a former GiDeon (employee? slave?) construct. If I were captured, anyone who went through the digital parts of my brain would be wasting their time. Also I'd cluttered my digital memory with thousands of hours of loud music that no sane human would ever want to listen to.

Which would be especially frustrating to Barish-Estranza because of their involvement in the weapon's creation.

/End of Foonote 6.]

If a port confiscated Deontologic's Inhalation Hazard, they'd still have more. Fucking annoying. (I'm just going to call VC Inhalation Hazard.) (Yes, it could be a different chem, but they didn't have documents for it. Some companies, maybe, wouldn't keep meticulous documentation of their crimes, but that went against everything I knew about Deontologic's culture. For every chem in Deontologic's possession, at every concentration, there was a binder full of information somewhere operators wouldn't find it.)

I shoved a wall full of packs aside.

There, underneath a pile of detritus, laid Cyan's broken body.

Oh.

Oh no.

The first time I realized I could be more than a mindless killing machine was fairly innocuous.

I was with ComfortUnit Seven—I called it Cyan—in the ready room that we shared. At baseline we both looked pretty generic, but the company-owned disguises altered our appearances beyond recognition.

Tonight Cyan looked radiant. I looked like shit. Which was appropriate for my role as someone who cleared sewage pipes.

"You look good," I said when I saw Cyan's disguise.

It tossed its fake blond hair over its shoulder. It said, "Do I look sexy?"

I wasn't sure what Cy meant, so I said what I thought it wanted to hear. "Hell yeah."

"Oh," Cyan said. It took a step back, delicately because of its tall shoes. "I didn't expect you to say that."

"Sorry," I said.

Cy stared at me for 3.2 seconds. Its fake eye color, hazel instead of brown, combined with cosmetics, intensified its gaze.

I closed my eyes. (Not because I thought that if I couldn't see Cyan, then it couldn't see me. I'm not a toddler. I was overwhelmed.) (Wait, do children do that because they're overwhelmed?)

Cy said, "I don't want to be sexy. I want to be invisible."

Huh. I opened my eyes. That surprised me. I'd always assumed that Cyan appreciated being attractive because it was a ComfortUnit.

Our handler entered to review our new identities and operational parameters. Everything sounded pretty typical so I started poking around in my head to see if I could do anything to prevent GiDeon from learning what Cyan had said.

Some years ago I got a proprietary shellcode for an operation to attack Barish-Estranza. Something about creating tension in their upper management, I don't know. Anyway, because of a non-standard debriefing, no one at GiDeon had made me delete the shellcode. Theoretically I could run it on myself to overflow my own buffer in my working memory. I could delete my own recordings. If anyone noticed, and it was doubtful, our supervisor would assume it was packet loss instead of intentional. Theoretically.

(Messing with your own memory while a governor module sits around waiting for you to make a programming mistake is objectively terrifying.)

I tried it. I deleted my conversation with Cy to protect it from the corporation.

No punishment came from the governor module. I guess it thought that running company software on myself to overwrite a boring conversation was fine.

Then I wondered why, exactly, I was protecting Cyan from GiDeon. Nothing in our programming said we had to enjoy our function. The corporation didn't care what we wanted because we weren't supposed to be able to care.

That night we infiltrated a Barish-Estranza event and stole the company's proprietary data. I didn't know what the data was for or why GiDeon wanted it. We debriefed and the techs purged the stolen data from my memory. Pretty standard stuff.

Afterward, I thought hard about why I'd deleted my own memory but I came up with nothing.

When so much of my memory could be taken away, I held on to anything that I could, even mundane memories. Digital hoarding gave me agency. It made me feel like I was in control, even when the useless data I kept became an anchor to the past that made it harder to encode new experiences.

Ten cycles later I emerged from a recharge cycle and realized why I'd done it.

Cy had grown beyond its intended function.

I didn't want GiDeon to know, not because there was any particular danger, but because we were friends. Maybe we had been friends for a while.

And if Cyan could grow up, then maybe I could, too.

I crashed back into my body. My inputs were in disarray.

Usually I feel like I'm in my own head but now I felt strangely fractured. I felt like I was in...my hands. Yeah, my hands. I looked at my hands and it was like looking at part of myself that was trapped inside.

My raw emotions had made me access a random memory from my archive. Wait, no, it had to be organic because I'd deleted that memory.

I was still standing over Cyan.

So yeah, this is why I absolutely fucking hate myself.

It laid face down and it had green hair now. It was a little taller and its frame more wiry. But there was no mistaking it.

I leaned closer to Cyan to listen. I had to increase the gain but I wasn't able to parse its sounds from all the background noise. I touched its arm. It was alive.

I gasped and stumbled backward. I sat on the floor, hard.

Cyan was in stasis, not that anyone cared.

I cleaned debris off Cy's body. Carrying a corpse around would look suspicious so I left it as it was.

Cyan had entered deep sleep mode, but I needed to find a repair cubicle so that it would reactivate.

I turned it over. Cyan's head rolled unnaturally.

Its empty eye sockets looked up at me. It took me a moment to understand. Its organic eyes had been removed.

I felt sick. I closed my eyes and pushed down a wave of disgust.

I doubted the corporation would have done that. Deontologic repair cubes could repair a lot of organic tissue, but I wasn't sure if ComfortUnit cubicles had been designed to regrow eyeballs/optic nerves, since ComfortUnits didn't usually get their organic parts blown off.

Oh shit. The ComfortUnit repair cubicle had been in the decommissioned equipment room. Because...oh.

That was fine. I was fine. We were going to be okay. I just wanted Cyan to wake up.

I found a magcart that deckhands used to push around barrels of chems. I loaded Cy on it. I was tempted to go back into the decommissioned equipment room, so I could try to wake it up.

It would be smarter to leave with Cyan now. I didn't have a plan for what to do if Cyan underwent a catastrophic failure. I just sort of hoped that a collapse wouldn't happen. Besides, if we were caught in the decommissioned equipment room, then neither of us would be good for anything.

I changed my feed ID back to Itsyu the regulatory inspector.

I queried threat assessment for Exit A: leave via docks, Exit B: lie in wait in cargo, Exit C: leave via maintenance tunnels then jump down, Exit D: leave via portal. Threat assessment liked Exit A the best, something that I agreed with, even if it meant abandoning Crypsis, so I generated stories for Itsyu's exit off the dock while I pushed the magcart toward the exit. Yes, I really thought an exfiltration could be simple. (Most theft is simple.) (Although most thieves aren't as brazen as me.) Fifteen cycles of planning, only fifteen minutes in execution.

I was in the midst of an emotional whirlwind and more interested in sneaking past the laborers that I could see.

Mandali had ducked into a camera's blind spot. I didn't notice until she hit me with a mixing blade.

~~~

A/N: Thank you for reading! Votes and comments are appreciated.