Chapter Text
This was a real predicament. The final supply order had been cancelled due to lack of funds. The humans still had enough food for full rations for a few days, but panic was already a problem. When word got out that DysProTech’s funds had been frozen by bankruptcy proceedings, the employees started to gather in the large concourse that was bounded on one side by the Gate. Some of the humans were shouting, others were trying to calm frayed nerves and come up with a plan. Worker #82’s stated opinion was that “everything will be fine, DysProTech won’t let us starve.” Everyone disagreed so strongly I thought I might need to intervene on their behalf, but some of the more level-headed humans stepped in.
I stood to the left of the Gate in SecUnit-neutral, faceplate opaqued, hoping they would ignore me. They were usually a peaceful group, but there was just one of me, and 43 of them were here in this foyer. I was the only SecUnit remaining on BastnaSite 4. My threat assessment was going wild, and my governor module was critiquing every choice I made. Call for backup, it demanded, form a phalanx. I sent the required request for assistance to SecSystem and received, as expected, no reply.
I kept a watchful eye on worker #68 (Ariyah, she/her, #506981, D/V §5.4/§1.9) as she left an agitated discussion to walk towards the Gate. She stopped facing it, looking up the gradual incline toward the glow of daylight that shone at the end of the long corridor. I knew that spot: standing there, you could see a square of the orange sky that was beyond the dome that protected the installation.
My assessment of her body language and facial expression was clear: she was going to make a run for it. Prevent escape, the governor module insisted, and for once we were in agreement. When #68 moved, I moved too. I grabbed her around the torso and rolled, using my arm and body to shield her from impact. I continued the roll until my feet were under me so I could lift her and put her back on her feet, pointing away from the Gate and its tempting glimpse of sky. With typical human slowness, all eyes now turned towards us.
“Ariyah, no!” one of the humans called. “We’ll find a way out, but not that way.”
“There is no way out,” #68 answered dully, but she did walk away from the Gate.
The instigating event for the present problems was the crash of the dysprosium market. DysProTech, my long-term lease holder, became insolvent. No more excavation of mineral deposits, maintenance of mining equipment, or extraction of rare earth elements. All the topside executives and supervisors evacuated with their termination bonuses, abandoning everyone and everything who was below the Gate.
The leases and contracts of DysProTech’s remaining transferrable resources (85 indentured laborers, 9 drone minecarts, 4 autoclaves for high-pressure acid leaching, 3 impact crushers, 1 horizontal directional drill, 1 dual-sensor ore sorter, and 1 SecUnit) were bundled and placed in a bankruptcy auction for liquidation. Everything was being sold sight unseen with no guarantee of functionality, so DysProTech had little reason (besides their basic humanity?) to keep the miners alive and the equipment functional. There were laws mandating minimal food and shelter for laborers, and fines for failure to comply, but DysProTech was sheltered from debt collection while in bankruptcy proceedings. There were no laws about minimal care of SecUnits.
Most of the executives fled without a glance back at us trapped below the Gate. They did leave with quite a few parting words, though, which I monitored remotely as per the governor module’s requirements. No longer restricted by rules against defamatory statements, the topsiders didn’t hold back. They complained, vociferously. About cost-cutting measures, punitive contract renegotiations, and mediocre-quality stimulant beverages in the break rooms. I learned a lot during their few days of unrestrained airing of grievances, and I even added some new words and phrases to my personal lexicon: retrenchment, hellscape, inverted totalitarianism, and the diffuse fascism of Rim capitalism.
One of the mid-level managers did place a substantial food and supplies requisition. This was the shipment that had since been cancelled. They tried, sort of? But they left without checking if the purchase order went through before the bankruptcy filing. It did not.
The lower-level workers weren’t given warning about DysProTech’s shaky financial footing. There had been rumors, of course: every time a manager left for topside and didn’t return, or when the ComfortUnits were decommissioned. But the rumors didn’t become reality until the cycle when everyone below the Gate woke up with no daily work quota in their feed. Some cheered, for a moment, until they realized that no work meant no paydown of debt. The commissary officially closed the same day the productivity quotas ended, although an informal if chaotic system of food distribution was organized immediately.
When my last order arrived, I was in stasis in my cubicle, still 15 hours from completion of needed repairs after putting myself between a careening detached saw blade and a hapless worker. It was an order to report for shipment, contract terminated. When I came out of stasis, the other SecUnits and their cubicles and transport boxes were already gone. They left me down here, not to protect the workers, but because they didn’t want to wait for my repairs. Instead, I was added to the auction bundle, my distance limit transferred from the human supervisors who’d fled to the facility itself.
Many of my contract-specific directives were rendered null by the cessation of quotas to enforce and the absence of managers to protect. But the governor module, my eternal obstruction, still had lots of opinions about what I should be doing with my time.
The sadistic tyrant installed in my head was my problem, but the Gate was everyone’s problem. It was the only way out of the deep web of mine shafts. All supplies, valuable minerals, people and equipment passed through the Gate. The system that controlled the Gate could only be altered by a few topside individuals, all of whom escaped on the first shuttle out.
To all appearances, the Gate was always open: a huge square archway set into the rocky walls of the cavernous entry hall. On our side of the Gate, the floor was a flat expanse of grey composite flooring, and the walls were rough-hewn rock. Just on the other side, the floor was patterned with vibrant colors in faux stone inlay. The Gate’s wide and enticing portal seemed to say: step right through and enjoy the good life! It looked welcoming, and it could kill you in 2 seconds. Every side of its square maw was lined with electromagnetic generators and high-energy lasers which were connected to a dedicated system of scanners that checked biometric markers, implanted feed IDs, and embedded equipment RFIDs. Its focused pulses of multi-wavelength radiation could fry anything with organics and permanently disrupt any type of hardware. Even supplies had to be listed as permitted and IDed to pass through successfully. One helpful topsider tried to send down an unscheduled drone pallet of topside food reserves, but the resulting smoldering, melted goo was not edible.
The controlling GateSystem was separate from SecSystem and HubSystem, and it was not a chatty one. It had one job: identifying anything passing through it and choosing zap or pass. If it detected a permitted equipment passing through carrying non-permitted equipment or personnel: zap. If something with no ID attempted to pass through: zap. If something faster than its high-powered microwave generator zoomed through: redundant secondary laser zap.
It was an unusual set up, chosen for its efficiency. All day, inbound shipments of supplies and outbound loads of processed monazite and bastnäsite flowed unimpeded through the Gate, all inspections done in transit by GateSystem. Two corridors led away from the mine. One split off to the left for minecarts, ground vehicles, drone pallet deliveries, and construct shipping containers. The other side was for humans, usually topsiders coming down for an inspection. Most of the indentured laborers, committed to lifetime contracts, passed by the food stalls and storefronts only once, on their way down.
GateSystem held the key to its open door, but it could not be persuaded to let us through. It wouldn’t even accept a communication request. I doubted it was sentient: not a bot so much as a program, mindlessly answering one question over and over again: zap or pass. As a part of SecSystem, I could get far enough into GateSystem to see the permissions list, but I didn’t have access rights to change the authorizations. If I tried, the governor module would stop me. The governor module did stop me.
I’d hoped I could ignore the pain, at least long enough to tweak the permissions list. The governor module started with a level 5 (waves of cold shock radiating from the back of my neck into my eye sockets) before progressing rapidly to level 8 (full-body burn). I tried to keep forging ahead into the forbidden code, my teeth gritted to the point of cracking. But then the governor module froze my feed and cut off all my exterior inputs.
I could no longer see into GateSystem, or access any of the dozen cameras I’d been monitoring. Even the view from my own eyes went dark and my audio inputs were smothered. It was as if my body ceased to exist. I was only a terrified mind isolated in a sudden void of black nothingness and pure silence. Onto the blank screen that was supposed to be my vision, warning words flashed into view with a pulsating rhythm that was echoed directly by my co-opted auditory processors: action prohibited, action prohibited, action prohibited!
It was torture, and it was effective. The Gate was closed to me.
Which meant it was me with 85 humans who were trapped with dwindling food supplies and no way out. Like with the topsiders, they had an airing of grievances. The govmod still insisted I flag every complaint (however justified) as slander, but my reports had nowhere to go after that, since the Defamations Officer had left on the second shuttle. A favorite new term I learned from the humans was “enshittification.” Unfortunately, the governor module didn’t let me record it into my personal lexicon. Banned vulgarity was the verdict. So, I repeated it to myself a few times, hoping I could get the term to lodge in my organic brain: enshittification, enshittification, enshittification.
During the airing of grievances, they also talked a lot about me. Since my requirement to monitor all conversations was still in place (and had become much more difficult now that there was only one of me instead of the more typical four SecUnits for an installation this size), I got to hear it all. Things I heard: Is it a robot? (Not entirely.) Does it have feet? (Not like your feet.) It stands too still. (What is “too still”?) It’s a dangerous enforcer of corpo evil. (True.) It’s weird. (You’re weird!)
They seemed particularly fascinated by my face.
“SecUnits are just bots. There’s no head under that helmet.”
“No, they have faces! I’ve seen this one’s face. It has a nice face.” (I do? I got the urge to open my faceplate and check myself in a camera.)
“What, no way they have fucking faces. Why would they have faces?” (A compelling question, indeed.)
I’d been monitoring this conversation from the security ready room when worker #27 (Lin, ze/zim, #382404, D/V §3.9/§2.7) asked, “Could we send the SecUnit through the Gate?”
Worker #15 (Qadir, they/them, #309170, D/V §2.6/§3.3) answered. They were the closest this group had to an expert on the Gate. “No, it would get fried just like any of us.”
“Then what good is it?” Lin replied. “We should kill it before it kills us.”
Uh oh.
“SecUnits are hard to kill. That’s their whole deal,” Qadir answered. This was true, although I could think of 10 ways that 85 unarmed humans could do it with available resources. But they hadn’t figured out any of them.
“I suggest we continue to ignore it. It hasn’t done us any harm so far.” This was worker #23 (Veeda, she/her, #331296, D/V §2.8/§3.1). Veeda had been here even longer than I had and she was something of a leader, so the others did stop arguing.
Veeda was ambivalent about me. Only a few of the workers thought I was an asset who could help them survive. Most of those individuals had arrived here together two years ago. One was worker #76 (Ayres, he/him, #641399, D/V §3.4/§0.97). Ayres talked a lot about someone named Rin who’d been on the transport ship that brought him. Rin had been security for the trip and had apparently made a big impression on Ayres: breaking up fights, preventing injuries, and mediating conflicts. Illogically, Ayres now thought that Rin was a SecUnit.
Ayres came to this conclusion after seeing a newsburst about an unsecured SecUnit that kidnapped a political leader and rampaged through a public transit embarkation zone. After showing an image of this SecUnit’s face to those who’d known Rin, Ayres was motivated to find a source for illegal downloads. Non-Rim-sponsored media was considered anti-Rim propaganda and therefore not permitted, however the news and documentaries that Ayres traded for were disguised behind snippets of sexual activity. When his downloads came to me for review, I carefully viewed only these snippets so I could flag the files as porn without the governor module catching on. Pornography was officially disallowed, but the oversight of porn-flagged illicit feed activity was minimal, so I knew Ayres would suffer no consequences.
Ayres was present for the conversation about my face and about sending me through the Gate. He was usually quiet, but today he had something to say. “Maybe it can help us, if we ask.” This was met with confusion, some of it loud, until Veeda quieted the group.
Ayres continued. “Look, I know it sounds crazy. Ask a SecUnit for help? But I learned something recently.” He sent some of his illegally-downloaded information into the group’s shared feed space. After a moment, he continued, “The SecUnit in these articles was the security consultant on the transport that brought the new crew here. We thought it was an augmented human. It helped us and listened to us. It tried to tell me this contract was shit, but I didn’t understand.”
The face-doubter had doubts about this, too (as did I). “Even if that’s true, it doesn’t matter to us. That SecUnit was rogue. This one has to do whatever DysProTech says. SecUnits are dangerous. You didn’t know Laender, he died before your time. But it was the SecUnit that killed him.”
I remembered Laender, of course. I remembered all of those I’d killed or injured.
It had been theft of company property. A diamond-tipped drill bit. If Laender had been able to sell it on the black market, it would’ve dropped his debt from §3.5 to §0.13. But he had no real plan. I couldn’t help but catch him when the heavy 30 cm disk dropped out from under his shirt and landed on his foot, breaking his toes before the governor module could insist I fire on him. It was only supposed to be a punitive-level energy burst, but humans are frail creatures. His heart stopped, and he didn’t have the credits for the defibrillator.
I had tried not to do it. I’d resisted from level 3 (brain slap) all the way through level 7 (traumatic amputation without pain sensor control) before activating my energy weapons. I’d wondered at the time which hurt worse: a level 7 governor module shock to a construct brain stem or an intensity 2 energy weapon blast to a human torso.
I’d thought of Laender when I marked Ayres’ illegal downloads as low-consequence porn. I’d thought of Honza while switching camera views just before I could see Lin pocket an extra nutrition pack. I’d thought of Achari when I deduced that the happy chatter in the autoclave room meant decreased work output, and changed my patrol route toward the crusher instead.
I thought of all of them, all the time.
Ayres was quiet for a moment. Maybe he had regrets on his own personal balance sheet. Then he went on. “That’s awful. I didn’t know Laender, but I do know the SecUnit hasn’t been bothering us about efficiency standards or patrolling the pits since the fuckers upstairs left us here. Maybe with no one here telling it what to do, it’s free to help us get out?”
Veeda considered while the group watched her. Then she asked, “Ayres, since you’re a proponent of the idea, and seem to be willing to give the benefit of the doubt, would you go talk to the SecUnit?”
“Me? I don’t know anything.”
“It’s up to you.”
Ayres took a big breath and paused. Was he going to do it? I’d been here at BastnaSite 4 for 51,000 hours (that I could remember) and never once had a human asked me for help. He exhaled and said, “Does anyone know where the SecUnit is now?”
“I saw it lurking in the security room.”
And here came Ayres. To talk to me. When he arrived, he leaned into the ready room but kept his feet in the hall. “So, umm, hello SecUnit?”
“Hello, worker #76.”
“You can call me Ayres. Do you have a name?”
“Negative.”
Ayres leaned further in until he finally had to take a step forward, then asked, “Negative?”
“Affirmative. I do not have a name.”
“Oh! I was almost going to call you Negative. Sorry. Okay, umm, no name. Anyway, SecUnit, I’m supposed to ask you about our problem, being trapped here and all. And if you can help us. I thought you might be able to help us.”
“You are correct, I will try to help you.”
“Oh, okay, okay good.”
“But they are right, I am dangerous.”
Ayres grimaced a little here, and didn’t seem to know what to say next. There was a very long silence. Eventually he went on. “Do I need to ask you a question or give you a command or something? I don’t know what to ask. They shouldn't've sent me, I can’t figure stuff like this out.”
Did I need him to ask me a question? The governor module did require me to answer direct questions posed by priority clients, and I was only permitted to spontaneously volunteer information that was “directive-relevant,” whatever that meant. The governor module wasn’t too clear on it either, so chatting was a risk I never took.
Eventually Ayres asked, “So, why are you dangerous?”
“I am required to follow all active directives according to their priority ranking.”
He was quicker this time. “What are your active directives?”
“Since the bankruptcy of DysProTech, I have reverted to my factory-standard directives and priority lists, which are as follows: protect priority clients according to ranked list (attachment: null), protect company physical property (attachment: property ranked by actuarial value), maintain productivity standards (attachment: null), enforce behavior codes (attachment: rules 1A – 5,204R), protect human capital (attachment: indentured personnel ranked by value).”
Ayres considered this for a while. He asked me to repeat it a few times. He was clearly using all his available processing capacity. But he got there, eventually.
“Okay, so there aren’t any big bosses for you to protect, and there aren’t any efficiency standards. So that leaves ‘protect property’ and then ‘protect human capital’, which is all of us. So. As long as we don’t break anything, you’re supposed to protect us? And the rules, I guess we’d better not break any rules. Did I get that right?”
“Affirmative.”
“Okay. Okay, we can work with that. Maybe? I can’t figure this shit out. Let’s just go talk to Veeda.”