Slapdash Neural Wiring | The Murderbot Diaries | SecUnit Nine #2 [✓]

2. My mind races over nothing

So that was how I was alone in the universe, in a dark container full of an unidentified dangerous powder, with no one else for company.

(Yeah, I tried not to think about packing myself in an enclosed space with the mutagenic powder too much just to obscure my transponder. I didn't know what Inhalation Hazard was, exactly, because the chem IDs were all proprietary, but the intact packs were encased in multiple layers of packaging, so even with Crypsis's door open, the powder wouldn't harm me in the near-term. Theoretically. And the other chems were liquids or had properties that were even worse than mutagenicity, so it was another calculated risk.)

Well, maybe there wasn't literally no one in the cargo hold. Cyan could be in the cargo hold with me—I didn't know for sure yet.

I flipped through surveillance footage but I didn't see any ComfortUnits in private quarters, walking around halls, or anything. It raised the probability that Cyan was 1. in the cargo hold with me, or 2. in the decommissioned equipment room lockers. Or maybe 3. not aboard Moiety at all, but I'd consider that if the time came.

I had to wait until there weren't any humans around to catch me being weird. There was a shift rotation scheduled soon, which would be my opportunity to be weird and look for a (discarded?) ComfortUnit that didn't want to be here.

So now I just had to wait.

I thought about how if everything in my plan went sideways, I could still hide inside the cloaked vehicle to obscure my stupid ass transponder.

Alone time was excellent because I finally had enough time and quiet to listen to Mariroko's Out of Pocket album the way that the artist had intended.

It was bad news because my brain decided that quiet time for replaying my worst memories in horrifying detail. Bad thoughts were familiar, but bad thoughts with this intensity had never happened before.

I'd offloaded the recordings that would fact-check my organic memory to a secure server and deleted the copies in my head. Maybe I'd wanted to forget, but it wasn't that easy, apparently. I had a feeling that my brain was exaggerating how badly the kidnapped humans at Proving Ground 71b had convulsed to death as toxic gasses permeated through their safety gear, while I stood motionless—

Anyway, I'd come back to a subsidiary of GiDeon to steal Cyan from the company.

Yes, it was a stupid thing to do. But I am stupid, so.

~~~

[Footnote 3: You may wonder why an agrochem/ chemical weapons corporation has ComfortUnits.

(Oh, that's not what you were wondering? Well, fuck you, this is what I want to talk about.)

GiDeon used ComfortUnits to steal proprietary information to cut R&D costs when, you know, it was deemed too dangerous to send humans. Some companies, like Barish-Estranza, realized that ComfortUnits were engaged in corporate espionage. They supplied suspected spies with false information in order to waste company time and resources on unachievable synthetic routes. Sometimes, though, the red herrings were accidentally productive. B-E slipped falsified data into GiDeon's grubby hands about a wholly new chemical weapon that all the best researchers at the time thought would be impossible. GiDeon, of course, made Nervous Breakdown anyway, because we had none of the best researchers.

/End of footnote 3.]

~~~

In order for humans to like me, I had to be nothing like myself. I'd made contacts here because the cargo ship's crew was small, so I wouldn't be able to blend into a crowd. But I had based all of my different characters—Anghen, Jin, and Itsyu—on an existing character that I'd played during a short-term assignment at Barish-Estranza, with a couple of traits changed to appeal to my new marks. Now that I was back at a GiDeon company, I wondered if that had been a mistake. I wondered if they would notice one of their own pretending to be one of their own fake personalities.