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

11. Interrogation

To my surprise, I restarted.

The governor module hack was still in place. I felt Hostile One lurking around it. When I tried to tap my module, they shoved me into the rest of my brain. They didn't want me to meddle with my own governor module.

I was still inside the mess hall/decomissioned equipment room. All the doors were closed. They had used a harness to tie me to a piece of heavy equipment, which was itself bolted to the floor. I still had my one arm and the portal device.

Hostile One ripped my bag from my torso while I was in that weird state between booting and full consciousness. They handed the bag to a human.

"You won't be needing this anymore," the human said to what might have been my corpse.

Hostile One looked terrible. It was probably from when I'd knocked them into the tank of Bonemelter; their symptoms just hadn't had time to appear until now. (That was part of the danger of Bonemelter. You could fall into a tank, crawl out, and assume you were fine, right until your bones melted. Or dissolved. Whatever.) Now their skin had turned silvery-white and swollen where it had been in contact with the Bonemelter. They had received treatment, though, because their skin and bones were not in a puddle under the floor.

The human who Hostile One had given my portal device to was Supervisor Bailer, the same human who had beat up Cyan and supervised Mandali. He also had another human with him, the maintenance lead, Ed Sandale.

Then I realized that I was awake, with a hostile augmented human or a disguised SecUnit in my kernel space. It meant that I was going to feel myself die.

I hadn't prepared myself for this, both alive and subject to an interrogation. My contingency plan in the event I was captured was to be dead so they would never get information from me.

Hostile One hadn't left my governor module offline out of compassion. They kept it offline so that death wouldn't be an escape option. There would be no escape from the torture that Supervisor Bailer had planned for me.

Oh, had I thought that Hostile One was a human? That was so absurd I couldn't believe it had come from my own brain. Hostile One's feed connectivity was too advanced. Hostile One could even hide their presence in the feed, even from me, like a SecUnit without any internal weapons. Being a SecUnit with no internal weapons would help them blend in with humans. Removing internal weapons from a SecUnit was such a simple change that it was brilliant. Not only would they be hidden in plain sight, it would be cheaper to make a SecUnit with fewer features.

Or maybe not. Changing factory things to custom things was expensive, right?

So maybe Hostile One was really an augmented human whose free will had been restricted by chemical means. That would explain why Hostile One seemed so slow to me. Deontologic had chemical and biological expertise. Kidnapping a human, forcing augmentations, and keeping them under control by chemical means could be cheaper than getting a new SecUnit. Maybe. Deontologic might see it as a more sensible option than buying a new SecUnit, if they were using Hostile One to replace me. But then I didn't think a human would be able to hide their feed connectivity from me, hack my drones, and break my mental defenses. I couldn't be that close to obsolesence. Could I?

My head rolled but I forced my eyes open to look at the humans and Hostile One.

"Let's get our facts in order," Ed Sandale said. "We know who you are. You are not Anghen. You are Nine."

Neither human tried to make small talk with me in my Nine persona, which was good because 1. my performance reliability was at 33% so I couldn't think of a convincing lie, and 2. I didn't have opinions on anything, except that Mariroko was better than BR4N. And whatever Supervisor Bailer happened to think, of course.