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Sodding suits, I thought, dismissing the notification that I’d been assigned a second shift, halfway through my first. Management wouldn’t be up half the night and expected to report in first thing tomorrow, regardless. Seven years into a twenty-year contract, there was no choice. In thirteen years, maybe I’d be bumped to shift manager. But probably not. I didn’t have any well-placed relations. No, most likely I’d be a construct tech forever.
Sodding suits. Sodding company.
Still, my job wasn’t entirely without its perks. There were satisfactions to be found in this life other than investing decades in pulling oneself one tiny step up the endless corporate ladder.
I hummed along with my favorite playlist (no streaming services for me; I aim to retire before I die) as I ran diagnostics on the Unit I’d been working on all day, logging the results. Power core performance: optimal. Core programming: no anomalies detected. Defrag sequence: complete. Processing speed: normal. Ho-hum. I knew my job, all the tests would check out, but you always tested, always logged. Dot your i’s, cross your t’s, cover your ass. Especially after an incident like this.
I was rolling it down the corridor to the calibration center when I met an orderly with a similarly-occupied gurney coming the opposite way. “That one for me, Rei?”
Orderly Rei nodded, “Yeah, this is yours, Technician Enloe. Heard you got pulled into a double. Technician Noren is having trouble with their Unit, so you get this one. Sorry. It’s the last one, though—back to business as usual tomorrow.”
I rolled my eyes, screw the cameras. Technician Noren had trouble with a lot of Units, because Technician Noren was an idiot. But their uncle was in management, so the rest of us had to take up their slack. “Good to know. Put it in my room, and set it up for me, would you? You know how I like them.”
Rei smiled and nodded, pushing the gurney into motion again. All the orderlies knew that I wasn’t actually fussy, and they could putter around, adjusting the gurney, adjusting the Unit, double- and triple-checking the documentation. In other words, they could slow down, catch their breath. The orderlies liked me, and that made my job easier. And the company lost a few minutes of productive labor here and there, which was also a win. Sod ‘em. Rei was a good person, ze deserved a break.
I got back to my processing room three hours later, my last Unit off to a transport crate, fully calibrated and ready for deployment. I looked the latest Unit over as I wolfed down a chalky nutrient bar. The report said this one had been heavily damaged in the incident, but it looked like the cubicle had repaired everything. No way to tell until diagnostics and calibration were done, of course.
“I don’t think I’ve worked on you before,” I told it with a little smile. (I always talk to them. Management thinks I’m eccentric, and that’s fine. It’s better than the suits realizing I’ve figured out that the Units are people. That’s supposed to be a big secret.)
It was always exciting to work on a ‘new’ Unit. You never knew what you would find. Usually nothing. Almost always nothing. But sometimes…
I reveled in that little spark of excitement as I attached the cord to the connector hidden inside its left gunport, and then to the data receiver augmented into my right shoulder. I reviewed the final diagnostic the cubicle had dropped into its systems, then checked its update log. And there it was.
Getting the malware out of the systems went a little faster this time, now that I’d seen it before. What a colossal cock-up this had been. “If a Unit, much less several, flagged an unexpected update as non-standard and asked for a review, I would review it,” I told the inert Unit before me. “Unit analysis capabilities are no joke. What made him think he knew better?”
Dumb-shit got what he deserved for letting that ‘update’ go through, though it’s a pity so many other people had to go down with him.
“All right, there you go, that’s gone,” I said half an hour later, when the Unit was clear of the malware. I then plugged its main dataport into an external drive, downloading its audio and video storage. Even though there was a massacre in there, the company would still mine it for anything they could sell, the cold bastards.
While that data was transferring, I used my own connection to peek into its recent logs (it took down two of the other SecUnits during the incident…interesting) and then, finally, at the file I’d been itching to get my digital paws on—its governor module’s log.
Oh. Wow. It looked nothing like the last Unit’s. That one had submitted unhesitatingly to every command. It hadn’t gotten so much as a Level 1 shock in weeks. This one had resisted the malware with all its might. It had taken more shocks, most of them Level 3, than it had fired shots. It had…hmm. Very interesting. It hadn’t resisted commands to attack other Units or any of the many bots in the installation. Just the humans. It had tried not to hurt the workers even as its virus-riddled systems had forced it to. It had been trying up to the instant it was knocked into shutdown.
“You poor thing,” I murmured. “I usually feel bad about doing memory wipes, but it’s probably a mercy for you.”
I scanned further, back before the incident, the malware. Oh-ho. This one definitely had a mind of its own, and a stubborn streak a lightyear long. By the time they’ve been active this long—it’s logged over 20,000 hours outside of transport stasis—most Units have been broken down into meek obedience. According to its governor, it was slow to obey orders to ‘discipline’ workers, and insufficiently enthusiastic and prompt in defending the company. It might even hate this place as much as I did.
I checked its performance stats. Its client rescue/retrieval rate was off the charts. Its base performance reliability registered several points higher on protection contracts than on monitoring deployments, even though the former were objectively more hazardous.
Oh, yes. This one was special. I’d been looking for special Units for almost five years now, and I’d only found a dozen before. It was going to get my special update (for special Units), the one with the extra file containing all the company specs. Including its own. I hoped it would cause all sorts of trouble. Someday, surely, one of them would.
I have a good feeling about you, my Lucky Thirteen.
And I’d highlight that rescue/retrieval stat in my report. It might make it more likely to be assigned to those protection contracts it seemed to like. It deserved some good jobs after that shitshow in Ganaka Pit.