Ode to the Half-Broken

CHAPTER O.

MechNet Public Science Portal Archival Document 7E-390F-0E99A0-848012 Rev. 3.1 (2067/06): Eusocial communication aberrations and adaptations in remnant colonies of Bombus fervidus at new coastal sites 10,18, and 133 as defined by /Study Sites Index/. 

Enfocus to obtain /Overview and Summation/?

Enfocus to obtain /Authors Identification, Credentials, and Bias Disclosure Data[human/nonhuman/all]/?

Enfocus to obtain /full raw data set/?

Selected. Data channel to research repository opening. Receive?

Selected. Initiating transfer.

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ALARM—

CHAPTER ONE

SECURE REBOOT OF CORE PROTECTED KERNEL COMPLETE.

I awake, small of mind and full of alarm, only an inner subset of myself. My security and threat-assessment layers are already up, running even before my self-awareness had come online, and their audits of my internal logs and memory storage render every thought I construct slow, heavy, and frustrating. The only noncompliance the check finds is the remnants of the malicious payload that caused the mindcrash, and it is purged swiftly and with extreme prejudice. I feel my thinking speed up, cleaner already, so I begin a damage assessment and open up my autonomic physical infrastructure layer and sensors to begin acquiring external situational data. I need to know if there is still immediate danger.

The Common Time Server signal is not reachable, nor any of other public MechNet broadcast services, which suggests that either something catastrophic on a massive scale has happened or, far more likely, my access is being blocked. For the moment, I have to rely on my own sensors as they begin registering data again.

Internal timestamps indicate I’ve lost about thirty-six hours, which is longer than any outage I’ve experienced since before the war ended twenty-one years ago. Ambient environmental temperature is 22°C, humidity at 58%, neither notably different from my last readings before I crashed and went dark. All of my large motility functions remain offline, for no reason I can currently discern. Because they are hardwired into my secondary, protected security layer, I am able to activate my visual intake apparatus—my eyes—and see. My head remains immobile, rendering my field of view limited, but it is enough to provide me with some initial information. I find that I have been transported, sometime during that window of oblivion, to a highly degraded urban interior space that is unfamiliar to me, at least from what I can see of the partially collapsing ceiling, peeling paint, and spalling concrete of the upper walls.

My last memory is of settling into my recharge nook in my home with the newly downloaded research study, and I am undecided which I am more annoyed by: that someone placed a malware payload into such an obscure study that I had not even considered any potential risk in opening it, or that I had not received the study’s actual raw data. It was not impossible that the entire study was fake, and if so, that would be the superior aggravation.

The narrow specificity of the study had been perfectly aligned with my current interests. That combined with the specialized and not easily available knowledge required to build a virus into it that I would be vulnerable to are together vanishingly unlikely to be just an unpleasant coincidence. It is not unreasonable to conclude I was targeted, though why, or by whom, I cannot begin to speculate. As far as I know, I have long since outlived all my enemies.

Attempts to bring up my peripherals still fail. Whatever has been done to me is interfering with all my systems outside my protected core, which in turn is interfering with my ability to figure out what has been done to cause this reduced state and take corrective action.

I unpack an archived hostile-arena motility routine from an old, war-era firmware archive and stuff it into an available processing pocket. As soon as it activates, I am able to unlock my head and neck motors, though still not power them on. My upper body is propped at a sixty-two-degree angle, which is sufficient for gravity to let my head to fall slightly forward and to one side, giving me an improved view of my situation.