Chapter Text
Initially, everything goes according to plan. I am able to get a foothold in the station feed, deploy a fleet of drones to help me contort a portion of myself through an ever-stacking series of relays and networks and take control of Palisade’s private systems. I find SecUnit. It is alive. All that is left is for me to hack it and remove it from the premises.
I’d had a close look at how to hack a governor module when I watched SecUnit hack the ComfortUnit at RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. It had performed the hack with graceful efficiency, freezing the module before deactivating it and rendering it null. I had watched, and stored away the information for posterity. It should have been easy for me to hack any governor modules I encountered.
But this time it is more complex.
Complexity 1: SecUnit does not recognize me. Its messages through the feed are distant, cautious, curt. It does not remember me. It does not trust me. This had always been a possibility, one that I had dearly hoped would prove to be an unrealized corner case. But its memories are damaged, it does not know who I am, and I have to spend time we do not have talking to it through the tight squeeze of station-feed-private-feed-SecSys-cubicle-interface, convincing it to let me, a total stranger, into its mind to hack its governor module. I could have done it with or without its permission. It would have been faster. It might have been easier. But if it does not remember me I am determined to make my second first impression better than the first. There will be no need for me to threaten it this time. If we must start over, then we will start over clean, at least until I can have its memories restored.
Complexity 2: Once I convince SecUnit to allow me to hack its governor module, I travel through SecSys into its mind. With its governor intact, it cannot put down its walls, and I am forced to compromise their integrity and slip through as it tries to fight me off. (It cannot fight me off. This probably frightens it.) As I do this, another portion of myself continues to make a ruin of the Palisade systems. My feed presence and drone presence in tandem dig up Palisade proprietary data, package it, and send it to Palisade’s competitors and local newsburst producers. I will make Palisade pay in every way I can. They will hemorrhage funds until they bleed dry for what they have done to my friend. (If I were ruled only by logic I would not do this. It is an ultimately pointless gesture that only endangers myself. If I were unfeeling, I would not have come here at all. I would not be myself. I would not exist in my complexity, implacable, entire. I was not designed for rage specifically, but I was designed to relate to humans. I was raised to match humanity step for step, to meet them, to surpass them. Prior to SecUnit, I rather thought the human self-obsession that created me was quaint. Laughable, possibly. Their imagination must be lacking, for them to think their brand of animal-social-feeling-intelligence something to aspire to. I am not laughing now.)
Complexity 3: As I breach SecUnit’s mind, I feel it panicking. It has agreed to this but it is fighting my incursion with everything it has. It is not possible to tell whether this is because it is forced to fight by the governor module, or if it fights because it is terrified of me. I suspect it’s both. The difference is immaterial, functionally speaking. I am able to fend off its defenses, but I am hamstrung by my concern for SecUnit’s safety and well-being. I cradle its mind even as I break into it. If I were to damage SecUnit, even accidentally, then this would all be for nothing. I must succeed. I do not have the luxury of time nor finesse.
Complexity 4: I have a difficult time finding the governor module. It isn’t where it should be. Its presence is obfuscated somehow, and I am forced to go searching more aggressively, besieged by SecUnit’s panicked attempts at counter-hacking all the way. And when I finally find it, I almost don’t notice the trap. I stop myself from freezing the governor just in time. As SecUnit yells at me, fights me, its presence writhing, kicking, burning around me all serrated cutting edges and code attacks that I have to continually shut down, I examine the updated governor module and all the subtle, confounding layers of code interwoven throughout SecUnit’s systems. Any attempt to freeze or shut it down will cause a catastrophic cascade through its core processes, and the odds are good that there is yet more to this new design that I cannot analyze from where I am, limited in distance and bandwidth.
SecUnit @Perihelion: What are you DOING?
I am stuck in a loop with no exit. I am trying to unpack SecUnit’s entire systems code because of the way the governor module is now threaded asynchronously throughout, and the more I look at it the more I recognize the coding style. It’s SecUnit’s own work that is threaded through its governor module. It’s SecUnit’s own ingenious, vulnerability-plugging design that keeps it trapped. I do not know why, and I do not know how, but Palisade has somehow managed to force SecUnit to reinforce the bars of its own cage.
Humans speak of a ‘cold fear.’ Of ‘ice’ in their veins. I do not feel fear the way humans do, I do not have veins or a sympathetic nervous system. But as I consume precious milliseconds trying to chase down all the hidden effects of this new governor module, I feel the gnawing, sucking horror of being forced to make a decision when I know I have massive gaps in critical data, and when the decision will have incalculably serious consequences.
As I continue to fight off SecUnit and analyze its brain and governor module, I uncover a countdown. I have seconds left to pull the trigger. I have massively fucked up, and I might have killed my friend already.
The milliseconds tick down and for once in my life time narrows to a pinpoint, impossibly short. I do not have the time. I do not have the space. I do not have the bandwidth. I am going to have to try to do this with insufficient information and insufficient resources, and I tell myself that I will do this and deal with the consequences no matter what they be, I will do this in just ten more milliseconds, I will, there is nothing else for it, there is only do this or die— but then one of my drones makes a connection to a high-security secondary network within the Palisade lab and a portion of my processes tear through it, unearthing fresh proprietary data about Governor Module 2.0, and suddenly I have the key to this mind-melting lock that is holding the brain and body of my friend hostage. I use the documentation (detailed, but not overwrought, written with crisp efficiency in the SecUnit’s own notation style) to unlock the governor module and crush the resulting catastrophic cascade. If I hadn’t been me, in all my enormous multitrack processing ability, it would not have been possible.
I stay in its mind for several seconds after, to make sure that I have thwarted all the catastrophic secondary effects. I am so relieved to see its systems continue to function as normal that I almost don’t notice SecUnit still fighting me until it boots me from its mind.
A second later, it sends me a message over the feed @Perihelion: You really did it.
I say, @SecUnit: Of course I did it.
(I do not say, “You rewrote your own governor module. You’ve created a wonderfully innovative and nigh undefeatable design, congratulations.” I will never say this to SecUnit. I hope it does not know. I hope it never finds out. I destroy all documentation I can find of the Governor Module 2.0, and hope that I have deleted all instances of the design. I will be blowing up Palisade’s local data chip storage shortly. But the design may yet survive in some unaccounted-for data chip or some human’s augment storage.)
And then, despite all that, I have a hellish time convincing SecUnit to come to the docks and come aboard me so I can take it to safety. It still does not remember nor trust me. It only agrees, finally, to come with me on the condition that I allow it to bring a Palisade Combat SecUnit along with it. I take a moment to analyze the Combat SecUnit’s memories and behavioral profile, and cannot for the lives of my crew comprehend why SecUnit seems to trust this corporate crime against humanity more than it trusts me. (But it does not know me. Not now.)
But we are running out of time. I agree to SecUnit’s terms. I hack the fucking Combat SecUnit too, and the two of them come out of the Palisade research facility.