System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries Book 7)

BACK IN OUR ROOMS, I was stitching together a preliminary set of clips and writing the first draft of the narration. I was basing the story around the human contract workers I had met on the way to Milu, like a fictional version of what I knew had probably happened to them after they arrived at the work camp they were being shipped to, framed with a lot of corroborating documentary data.

It was taking up 94 percent of my processing space to do both at once, so ART-drone had to do all the explaining. Tarik looked dubious. Iris, who was still on the comm with Trinh, looked stressed. Ratthi looked blank and preoccupied because I’d already sent him the first draft of the outline to revise. I wanted him to revise the narration, too; I’d read a lot of his reports, he was really good at explaining things and making them interesting. It was obvious that we could have used more humans; I wasn’t sure we had enough with us to pull this off.

I’d partitioned a large segment of ART-drone’s and my processing space into a general feed work area for the whole group. The documentary clips I’d assembled to start with included the interviews with the corporate labor refugees who had been rescued from the bounty hunters on Preservation Station, segments from Dr. Bharadwaj’s documentary where she talked about indenture and slavery in the Corporation Rim, articles, newsfeed segments, clips from incidents I had seen in mining and work colonies. Times when I had been ordered to kill or hurt a worker for violating a rule. Times when humans had killed or hurt each other because they just couldn’t stand it anymore.

But it had to be personal to work, so the story I was making up/extrapolating from data was the most important part. I was using the recordings of my conversations with and interactions between the contract laborers on the ship who had thought I was an augmented human security consultant. The clips would show their personalities, show what kind of humans they were (mostly good, trapped in a terrible situation, knowing their future sucked but trying to pretend it didn’t) to make it personal, to make other humans care about them the way I cared about the fictional humans in my shows.

It was hard. I never liked watching helpless humans because I knew what happened to them, now I was having to not just watch it but create a story out of it and explain why and how it was happening.

I needed human opinions of the story and the documentary clips to make sure I was emphasizing the right things, and for them to make suggestions and to add any clips or research from their private feed storage. We had to get that done fast so ART-drone could put in the subtitles and citations. We also needed to start mixing the music and I was going to need a lot of human input for that.

SecUnit, Ratthi said in the work feed, I’ve been working on a history of corporate colony abandonment and I have a lot of sound clips and transcripts saved in my archive. I think we can use some of it.

This wasn’t a surprise; I knew that was one of Ratthi’s side research topics. The humans who lived in the Preservation system now originally came from an abandoned colony, and would have all starved to death except for an almost decommissioned colony transport with a crew who had decided to rescue everybody or die trying.

Die trying. It’s not the worst thing that could happen.

I sent him an acknowledgment and a quick guide to our input tagging system.

Then he sent me a note back: So, you may not know this, but I read your letter to Dr. Mensah, the one you sent when you left Port FreeCommerce. I think you’re absolutely the right person to write this.

I can’t handle that right now so I’m just going to archive it for later.

Some of the better newsfeed material I was turning up in my onboard archive search came as text descriptions of events and transcripts. ART-drone could translate them, turn them into dramatic readings, and run the text on a black background while the audio played. I know it’s not the most original technique, but it’s fucking effective. Also it would save a lot of time and our graphics-building queue was already too long with all the research data ART-drone had just dumped on me from its onboard archive.

ART-drone was also helping me organize our growing list of persuasive, emotional scenes from the fictional and nonfictional media we had in our archives. These were clips that weren’t relevant to the subject, but that we needed to compare and analyze to see how they did what they did. I know, this was why we needed the humans. Just copying the technical aspects was not going to get us what we needed, but it sort of helped to have them for comparison. Inspiration? Maybe it was inspiration. Anyway, looking at them made me feel weirdly encouraged.

ART-drone had also put up a list of guidelines, including: Think of this as a persuasive piece, like a presentation seeking funding for a research proposal. It does not have to compete with the commercial media composed by humans who know what they are doing.

Tarik, with an air of they can’t be serious, asked ART-drone, “How many human voices can you do?”

Since Barish-Estranza wasn’t pretending to play fair anymore, ART-drone had set up a listening device countermeasure around our area so the humans could relax and communicate without worrying about being recorded. My drones hadn’t detected any incursions; it was possibly an indication that B-E didn’t see us as any kind of a threat. Which, fine, do that, do whatever, B-E could go set themselves on fire for all I cared.

ART-drone said, Functionally, not an infinite amount, but as many as could be realistically needed.

“Any voices?” Tarik persisted.

“Of course any voices,” ART-drone said, aloud, in Seth’s voice.

“Holy shitting deity,” Tarik said.

I will be taking no more questions because our time is limited, ART-drone told him. You will be in charge of music since you have the most experience of those here.

Wide-eyed, Tarik put up his hands not unlike the way he had when he said he didn’t want to fight me. “I played traditional oud and bouzouki and danced a little when I was in school, I certainly don’t—”

Iris put the comm on mute, pointed emphatically at us, and said, “You need to interview him!” Then unmuted the comm again.

Interview him? Oh. Because Tarik had been in a corporate death squad. Maybe we could just steal the music from another show; it wasn’t like the colonists would recognize it.

Ratthi came out of his feed trance and said, “I’ll do it, but I have no idea what to ask.”

“Ah. That’s— Uh.” Tarik was thinking rapidly. ART-drone’s threat to put him in charge of the music had worked. “I think I know what we’re going for. We can figure it out together.”

Ratthi sent me an updated outline and I got to work assembling clips for ART-drone to start editing. The narration was going to be the hardest part. I started paging through the inspiration clips again. ART-drone caught me at it and said, Don’t worry about being persuasive. Just tell the story. We still have time for the humans to give their input.

You can’t slam down a comm, but Iris pulled the comm interface off her ear and made an aborted gesture like she wanted to throw it against a wall. (Been there, threw my whole body against a wall once.) My drones watched her set her jaw, frustration giving way to determination. She stomped over and dropped down onto the bed next to Ratthi. “The colonists agreed to watch our presentation, but they insist we leave by morning, when the weather is supposed to let up. That’s five hours. Where’s this music you need someone to work on?”

It took us four hours and twenty-seven minutes. We didn’t let Iris work on the music, because she was better at organizing and editing, and she had a huge supply of relevant text stored in her archive augment. She took over evaluating clips when Ratthi and Tarik were doing the interview. Also, she ended up reading the narration, though she didn’t think we should use her voice. (“I think they’re as sick of listening to me as I am of talking to them,” she told us.) So ART-drone converted her voice into Dr. Bharadwaj’s, which it had a good sample of from her documentary segments. (“This is absolutely not ethical, it’s the opposite of ethical and is explicitly against Preservation law, but I think she’ll forgive us under these specific circumstances,” Ratthi said.)

By the time we finished, we didn’t have time for the humans to watch the whole thing through, because it was 47.23 minutes total. So we divided it up into three separate segments and each watched one simultaneously. ART-drone processed the tweaks and corrections, and then we had almost no time left.

But when Iris called Trinh and asked to deliver it, someone else answered. They said only Trinh could speak to us and she was “unavailable until later.”

Iris closed the call very politely, and then sat there on the bunk squeezing her fists while we stared at her. She said finally, “Trinh didn’t trust me, but she didn’t trust Barish-Estranza, either. If she’s not part of the discussion anymore, that’s not good.”

I was sweating out of my organic parts again, we were so close. There had to be something we could do. Then Iris said, very quietly, “I will not give up.” She looked up at ART-drone. “Peri, how do we make them watch it?”

I don’t think force will be necessary, ART-drone said, and displayed the media directory AdaCol2 had shown us. I think we just need to make it available.

I should have thought of that, but after all that processing, my performance reliability was down. I needed a restart like nobody’s business. I called AdaCol2 and said, query: file upload permissions?

I didn’t know if AdaCol2 knew or understood what we had been doing. It had a connection to our feed but it would have had to get past ART-drone’s walls to see how high our activity levels had been. It said, query: file type?

I answered: video tag: entertainment, educational. It was really important that the entertainment tag go in first.

AdaCol2: query? It was asking me why.

We want your humans to see it, I said. Information, assistance.

It gave me an address and I sent the upload. ART-drone had a real-time view of the media list, but it hadn’t updated yet. It’s reviewing it, I told ART-drone.

It’s far more sophisticated than it’s pretending to be, ART-drone said.

“But will they watch it in time?” Ratthi asked. He was rubbing his eyes; all three humans had been tired before but now they were beyond exhausted, hyped up on stimulants and every food item we had with simple carbohydrates in it.

“It’s new,” Tarik said, waving his arms. “How long has it been since they got something new to watch?”

“And it’s good, it’s really good.” Iris paced. I wanted to think she wasn’t just trying to convince herself. “This was a good idea, SecUnit. Even if … It’ll be useful to a lot of people.”

Then AdaCol2 said, query: accuracy.NôvelDrama.Org owns this.

ART-drone had already bundled our annotated data and was shoving it at me. That was something the humans had come up with that I wouldn’t have thought of. We had our emotionally engaging story, and a presentation of the facts behind it with references, but we also had all the interviews, transcripts, videos, academic papers, newsfeed articles, etc., we had used to make it, like the data package part of a survey report. Including the original, longer version of Tarik’s interview done by Ratthi, though in the finished product we had given it the backdrop of ART’s crew lounge, which ART-drone thought was aesthetically better than the bare blue wall of this room, and we used the technique of cutting out Ratthi’s voice, so it was just Tarik giving the answers that complemented that section of the story.

AdaCol2 said, File uploaded just as it appeared in the colonists’ download menu. It was tagged entertainment and educational and most important, new, with a note that it was a gift from the visitors from the University of Mihira and New Tideland. I wished AdaCol2 hadn’t put that last part in. I didn’t think any visitors were super popular in this underground installation at the moment, but we, the uncaring academics who wanted to turn them all into lab experiments, were definitely coming in last. “It’s uploaded,” I said.

Iris stopped pacing and all three humans stared at me. I stared at them with my drones until ART-drone said, Even if they download it immediately, it will take approximately forty-eight minutes for a human to view it.

“Right, of course.” Iris pressed her hands to her face. “We should probably try to get some rest.”

“Or,” Ratthi said, perking up, “we could watch the whole thing together, the way they’ll be watching it.”

Tarik groaned. “You think that will be less stressful?”

At least no one had said if they watch it. Except I thought it, so. Whatever, I need to watch Sanctuary Moon now.

I couldn’t sit on the entertainment menu and watch the download counter because ART-drone cut off all our access to it until at least forty-eight minutes were up. The humans thought watching our video was a good idea and not a painful exercise in self-flagellation, but what do I know. Iris and Ratthi sprawled on the bunk while Tarik sat on the floor with his legs stretched out. ART-drone put up a display surface in front of them. With the editing, I’d already seen the video about 273 times so far, so I sat on the other bunk and watched Sanctuary Moon.

It was comforting, right, but I was really in the mood for something new. I hadn’t wanted to watch anything new since my stupid memory incident. ART had been keeping a list. When we got back, I’d have to let it pick the next show to make up for me being useless. I had new downloads off AdaCol2’s archive, but the humans were starting to distract me by not doing anything distracting.

I’d watched a lot of humans watch or read all kinds of media, so I knew that when they didn’t talk and didn’t move much except to eat crunchy things out of bags, it was a good sign. But then these humans had seen the Corporation Rim for themselves, they weren’t at all like the ones we were trying to convince.

And I was having a moment. The humans and ART-drone had tried so hard to make my stupid idea work. Tarik had clearly not wanted to talk about his past any more than I wanted to talk about my emotions, but he had done it anyway, because it might help. And Ratthi had been supportive and asked good questions no matter how pissed off he was with Tarik about the sex thing. Iris had trusted me to know what I was doing, despite all the evidence to the contrary that I had already given her. ART-drone had created graphics and voices and used our shared media storage to give itself a crash module in dramatic documentary production.

I gained interesting insights, ART-drone said. You should stop worrying.

Yeah, I’ll just code a patch to stop feeling anxiety, wow, why didn’t I think of that earlier. (That was sarcasm, I have too much organic neural tissue for that to work.) (Of course I’ve already tried it.)

The video finished. We had the list of sources appended, but hadn’t done credits, just a statement that it was a joint production of the University of Mihira and New Tideland and the Preservation Independent System Survey Auxiliary Team. (Credits listing three humans, a SecUnit, two intel drones, and a drone iteration of a transport just looked weird.) Iris sighed and said, “That was excellent, SecUnit.”

Ratthi said, “If they don’t like it, fuck them.”

Tarik snorted a crunchy thing and had to be pounded on the back by Iris. “I’m serious,” Ratthi said, doing an exasperated hand-wave thing. “If they can’t recognize the truth in an attempt to save their lives, I don’t know what else to do.”

Tarik drank from a container and croaked, “So how are we doing? Come on, Peri, I know you’re keeping track.”

ART-drone said, Three hundred and sixty-two downloads, two hundred and eighty-seven views still in progress, seventy-five views completed within the past 2.3 minutes. And counting.

We were all staring at each other again: the humans, my drones, ART-drone’s unresponsive carapace. It gave me access to AdaCol2’s media menu again so I could check for myself. It wasn’t lying to make us feel better. Two more completed views popped up while I watched.

“What does that mean?” Tarik was obviously trying not to be too hopeful. “How many people are here?”

“Four hundred and twenty-one.” Ratthi did look hopeful. “Almost everyone downloaded it. Except the young children. And some people would watch in groups.”

ART-drone picked up a static message to Iris’s comm. She started to accept, and ART-drone stopped her before she got too excited. It wasn’t from the colonists. It’s Supervisor Leonide, ART-drone said.

Iris’s expectant look turned disgruntled. She accepted the message and frowned as she listened to it. “Barish-Estranza wants to meet again. They’re leaving, apparently.”

The colonists had told us to leave by morning; they must have told Barish-Estranza, too. That had to be a good sign? I checked AdaCol2’s updated weather report and the disturbance was starting to die down, though later than predicted. I didn’t know whether we should leave or not, or pretend to leave and hang out somewhere nearby. Maybe the colonists just needed time to think and talk it over. Ugh, having hope that it might have worked was almost worse than knowing for sure it hadn’t. (I know, I’m never satisfied.)

Iris had made up her mind. “SecUnit and I will go talk to them. Tarik, you and Ratthi and Peri go get the shuttle ready.”

ART-drone said, Iris.

Iris shook her head. “We’ve done our best with the colonists. I’ve told them how they can contact us. But I want to know what else Leonide has to say. At best, maybe it’ll give us some idea of what they might try next, or if they’re writing these people off as a loss.”

It wasn’t a bad plan, as plans go. I could still object and say I’d go alone, like before. Iris had already said as security consultant that kind of thing was my decision. But considering how that had worked out, I didn’t want to get set up by Leonide to say something stupid again, not when we might be close to succeeding.