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

10. Break their stuff

We ended up waiting for several cycles before making a move. (GiDeon Rule Six: lull them into complacency.)

Plan D-0 disadvantage: The plan entailed great risk to myself; I wasn't sure if Cyan would stab me in the back at the last moment.

Plan D-0 advantage: We could steal data from a company, just like old times.

Cyan would do the stealing because it knew the server room better than I did, it was less likely to be cornered in the hub area, and it could physically store more data than I could. (I had a weapon in my arm. Cyan had data storage in its arms.) I would help.

I gave Cyan the pistol I'd stolen from Hostile One. It felt for the pins and checked that the safety was engaged, which it was. (Of course it was.)

Cy jammed the pistol in its waistband instead of shooting me in the face, which I chose to interpret as a good sign, unless Cy was biding its time so that it could shoot me in the back instead.

Cy said, "How am I supposed to take this without being caught?"

I unzipped the stolen coveralls and shrugged off my jacket. "It's a jacket that's flowy," I said. "It'll cover the pistol."

Cy put the jacket on. It said, "A flowy jacket doesn't seem like your style."

"It's not," I said. "That's why I bought it."

"What?" Cy said.

"All the clothes I bought in hiding are things I'd never be caught dead in. Because it's the safest way to never be caught," I said. "By never being dead."

I had intended that as a joke but it didn't land with Cyan.

I said, "Lots of people wear clothes they don't like."

"You're rationalizing," Cy said.

"I am not," I said. "Wearing clothes that I hate injects statistical noise into the surveillance advertising ecosystem."

I wasn't sure if I was serious or joking. I was definitely plagiarizing from our education module on avoiding detection by enemy SecSystems.

I could tell Cy didn't believe me. I decided to compliment Cy to distract it from how weird that I was acting. I said, "You look cool when you're strapped."

Cy's smile came easily. "I feel spectacular!"

Well, now I felt guilty for viewing compliments as meaningless token gestures.

In our secured connection, it sent I'm dressed to the Nines with a dancing human glyph.

I stopped feeling guilty. I resisted the urge to throw something heavy at Cyan's head.

Cyan said, "Don't you think they'll know I'm me but wearing your clothes?"

I said, "Yeah."

We waited until most of the management staff were in REM sleep, then we climbed back out of the cargo container and toward the HubSystem access chute in the decomm room. I left my detached arm inside the vehicle because Cyan had Code Breaker. I tucked the portal device inside my shirts.

I picked the lock one-handed in under three seconds. I opened the door. Cy put its hand on the ladder then turned to face me.

Cy said, Wouldn't it be easier to place a hack to drop the feed?

Yes, but a construct would place a hack. A human would need a device.

[Footnote 10: Hey, remember how back in Footnote 4 in Chapter 3 I said I'd talk about Code Breaker again? We were both so young then. Well, we're here now and we're going to address Code Breaker's real purpose.

Code Breaker's intended function was to prevent specific images from being recorded in surveillance footage. The details of anti-writing are boring, but Code Breaker jammed the signals between the cameras and the surveillance record.

Code Breaker took advantage of a fundamental problem of all SecSystems, regardless of their language or architecture. If data doesn't get written down, it doesn't exist in any meaningful way. Even GiDeon didn't have safeguards against its own hack, except for locks to prevent physical access, and I've been trained in non-destructive entry methods. After the device was removed/destroyed, SecSystem would go back to writing data normally, and no one was the wiser.

A remote hack (i.e., cutting yourself out of surveillance footage) left behind visual and code clues that data had been altered. The strength of Code Breaker was that no surveillance data needed to be changed if it wasn't written in the first place. And there weren't any meaningful countermeasures (yet) because no one outside of GiDeon (except for me, as far as I knew) had knowledge that something as sophisticated as Code Breaker existed.

So Code Breaker's ability to prevent locks from permalocking once too many passphrase guesses were entered was tied to its ability to break data writing. Both processes used the same fundamental principles, it's just that no one had used the approach that Code Breaker did. I guess it seemed like a convoluted method.

The downside was that I needed physical access to HubSystem to use Code Breaker's anti-writing function. That's what Cyan was saying—physical access was a nonstarter in most scenarios. It was easier to cut myself out of footage, and it was just as effective, assuming I'd be long gone by the time a human noticed something amiss. But for some reason I was really dedicated to pretending to be a human, so I dismissed Cy's idea.

/End of Foonote 10.]

Cyan sent an amusement sigil, which annoyed me. Everything annoyed me.

"See you soon," said Cyan. Cy put one of the safety harnesses on before it made its ascent from the decommissioned equipment room to HubSystem.

I watched Cyan leave. Huh. At this moment, Cyan had the choice to betray me and stay with its friends or to betray its friends.

I closed the door behind Cy.

Threat assessment hadn't changed, but I could tell something was wrong.

I hadn't connect to the ship's public feed,

humans didn't look upward often and Deontologic cargo ship had mediocre elevation data, so our hideout close to the ceiling would be confusing,

our enemies were only human, so it would take time to interpret the data if they detected us via the public feed.

As soon as we were on the ground, though, the hostiles must have known.

They knew we were using the cameras to look for hostile approaches because I realized, a beat too late, that the camera feeds had started a long loop as soon as my boots had touched the grated floor.

I could see Hostile Two in my organic vision, in the hall door we'd just come through, but not in the surveillance footage. Threat assessment spiked.

Approaching footsteps made me turn to look behind me.

Hostile One slammed me against the wall. They aimed their weapon at my head. Point blank range. Guess I'd die.

I made peace with my impending doom. At least I had stolen enough stuff from GiDeon to justify my existence. At least it had been Cyan who'd betrayed me.

The unfortunate thing about having all my processing power was that I had enough time to rationalize. It's hard to tell the difference between very augmented humans and SecUnits that are specifically designed to look like augmented humans. Hostile One had no energy weapons in their arms but tons of space for storing and processing data, like a second brain. I didn't think a human would volunteer for that much augmentation.

Then a foreign presence sliced through my mental defenses.

The intruder scraped the inside of my skull and cut right into my kernel space. The presence bumped the governor module.

Oh. That's what the pause had been for.

I initiated a shutdown. I didn't want to feel myself die.

~~~

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