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

4. Mandali

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.