Chapter Text
Reprogramming Chapter One
I had my feet up on the desk, looking at my screens and feeling pleasantly bored. There wasn’t much of anything going on in the lab right now. Even the docs were just reviewing data, sitting at their desks, instead of needing me or Niner to get something set up.
It couldn’t last, of course. A light started flashing on and off on one of my screens. I sighed and dropped my feet off of the desk, the boots making a clunking sound as they landed on the metal grating. I leaned forward and accepted the call, looking at Niner’s avatar as she appeared on the screen.
“Something up?” I asked, leaning forward and staring at the blandly attractive avatar of the AI.
“One of the drones has gotten itself wedged inside of a crawlspace and can’t get itself back out. Please free it, Mr. Lawson.”
“Sure, sure,” I said, rising to my feet and glancing at the map that Niner had thrown up on another screen. Ah great, it was outside, too. I’d have to suit up. “I’ll get right on it.”
I shook my head as I wandered over to the nearest airlock. As I went, I glanced outside, making sure that the weather was still nice and calm. If another thunderstorm had been kicking up, that drone could just wait. But both suns were shining down on the purple and green landscape. About half a mile away, I could see the faintly shimmering light of the perimeter fencing, keeping all the bugs and whatsits away from the base.
As I passed by the offices, Dr. Starshine poked her head out of her door. She looked at me like she had just stepped in something, but I didn’t take it too personally. In the two and a half months since she had arrived, the only time she hadn’t looked exactly like that was when she had been too tired to look like anything.
“Where are you going, Lawson?” She asked in a sharp, commanding tone.
“Right outside and then I’ll be right back,” I said, stopping in my tracks to look at her. So long as I didn’t stare at her scowling face, with her lips tightly pressed together, it was pretty nice to stare at her.
Though workplace regs meant that I couldn’t be too obvious about just looking at her chest (rather hidden underneath her white lab coat) or at her long legs which were a lot less hidden underneath the black skirt she wore. So I switched my gaze up a bit and looked at her long ears, poking out through the complex blonde hairstyle she was sporting again today. I didn’t know who she was trying to impress. It wasn’t like there were any other elves around here and even though the subject had never come up, I knew that there was simply no way she’d ever even think of having a relationship with any other race.
“Need me to get you anything while I’m up?” I asked, biting down on the urge to offer a pair of pliers to pull the stick out of her ass.
“No, just make sure that you properly decon the airlock this time,” she said with a sniff, going back into her office and closing the door, effectively making sure that she got the last word.
I grumbled to myself about getting blamed for the drones as I headed for the airlock. I didn’t meet either of the other docs on the way and I got suited up in silence before stepping out onto the surface of Eden.
A very prestigious name for a planet that had four living people (five, if you counted Niner) and no plans for anymore to come unless we struck a biomed gold mine in the alien flora and fauna around here. Still, what the hell, I was raking in the remote-station pay out here, even if there was absolutely nothing to spend it on, not even moonshine, since the resupply ships were all automated.
Shaking my head, I circled around the base to where that dumb drone was stuck. The building loomed over me, the three stories sticking up from the flat plain like a pimple. And… there was the drone, the tracked bastard tipped over on its side, half-in and half-out of the crawlway.
Grumbling, I leaned down and grabbed the base of the body, making sure that its limbs weren’t going to start waving around and whack me in the face. Niner shouldn’t be trying to still free it, but you could never be sure.
Thankfully, my greater strength and better leverage let me pop the drone right out of the hatch. Then it was pretty easy to set it back up on its treads and kick away the rock that had gotten lodged in the hatch, making it tip over.
“Watch yourself next time, alright?” I asked, looking down at the drone’s sensor, feeling a bit ridiculous taking to an AI like this.
“Of course, Mr. Lawson,” Niner’s warm voice said in the suit’s speaker. “Thank you for your assistance. That is all I need help with right now.”
I shook my head. Two minutes of getting suited up, three minutes of decon and another two desuiting, all for a job that took thirty seconds and could be done by a half-trained monkey. Oh well, it was just part of the job, I supposed.
I headed back for the airlock, glancing up at the blinking lights on top of the antennas rising up from the top of the Box. Steadily pulsing away, beating on and off, over and over again, not caring… man, I was getting bored if I was trying write poetry, wasn’t I?
Shaking my head again, I let the scrubbers clean off my suit, getting me ready to rejoin ‘civilized society’, or what there was of it on this planet. After a while, I was dressed back in the work uniform that all General Workplace Managers (dogbodies and go get ‘ems) under the employ of InterSyn Research wore. At least it had a better color scheme than what those poor bastards in The Astra Group had to wear. Neon pink and puke yellow, not a good combo.
Instead of heading back to my station, I wandered over to the canteen, such as it was. I toyed with the idea of getting my dinner early before deciding to just limit myself to a pack of water. We sure were living the high life, out here on Research Station Alpha One.
Idly sucking down the water from the pack, I passed by the door to Daniel’s office. It was hanging wide open and I glanced inside as I went. Doctor Daniel was sitting at her desk, staring down at her computer screen with a near-terminal look of boredom on her face. I knocked on the doorframe and she looked up, actually seeming relieved to push the tablet away.
“Everything alright, doc?” I asked, glancing around the small room and seeing that not much had changed since the last time I was in here. A scattering of trophies, both actual metal stands and preserved flowers and stuff, plenty of tablets here and there and not much else besides furniture. “You’re not pushing yourself too hard, are you?”
“No, thank you for asking, Jim,” Daniel said, leaning back and yawning. I lifted my eyebrows and her ears flattened as she looked away. “I’m just trying to get this report written up before the next supply drop comes by.”
“Don’t push yourself too hard,” I said, leaning against the door and looking at her. “Is it really worth your health?”
Lily Daniel was probably my favorite other person here on the station. Pretty easy to get along with, without the arrogance or the drive of others I could mention. Plus, of course, she was nice to look at. Pretty much everyone liked the dogs, for one reason or another.
Lily had some very dark fur and skin. Not quite black like humans got black, but pretty close. And the way her tail could wag back and forth when she was feeling excited was pretty cute. The fangs she showed off when she was feeling stressed or cornered were a lot less cute, but I had only seen them a couple of times in the year since I had arrived at the station.
“You sound like my mother,” Lily said with a yawn, glancing back down at her screens. “Don’t worry about it, Jim. This is the last thing on my to-do list and then I’ll go get some sleep.”
“Don’t want to push you or anything,” I said, “just… take care of yourself, you hear?”
Lily nodded and hunched over her report, starting to type once again. I looked at her for a few more minutes and then let her be, heading back to my own office, such as it was.
Someone was waiting for me when I got there. And since I had just met Lily and Starshine was still in her office pouring over whatever it was that administrators did, that only left one other person on this entire planet.
Dr. Satou was standing next to my desk, looking down at my screens. I was very glad that I hadn’t left any games pulled up before heading out to fix the drones. Sure, if there was nothing else for me to do, it made sense that I might as well entertain myself, but man, there was such a thing as professional pride.
“Mr. Lawson,” Dr. Satou said, turning her head to look at me with a bit of a snort. “There you are.”
“Yep,” I said, sitting down on the counter and looking up at her. “What’s up?”
Dr. Satou was the biggest, strongest person here by a long shot. I was pretty sure she was the smartest as well. Certainly smarter than me, at any rate. And she was pretty, which just seemed unfair when it was added on top of everything else. Well, it wasn’t like whining was going to change any of that.
Himiko Satou was a minotaur. A minotauress? Or the Asian variant of that, at least. It was some exceedingly long name that started with a H that I could never remember. And there was never a need to remember it, either, since she was the only one here and if anything was used to describe her, she made it clear that the word would be doctor.
She still looked pretty good, I had to say. The horns on top of her head could be a bit of a problem, especially since the airlocks were all much too small for her to get through without crouching. But, well, nothing she wore could disguise how big her breasts were and I had to be honest. I liked breasts and she had a very large pair of them.
I didn’t look at them now and just stayed staring at her face, hoping that she wasn’t here to file a repair request because she had scraped her horns against the ceiling tiles again. We were running pretty low on those and Starshine and I had worked together to find a solution to the problem. Which somehow ended up with all of the good ideas going down on record as coming from her and me contributing nothing.
“I wanted to let you know that there’s still an odd smell in Lab Two,” the doctor said, shaking her head back and forth and making her long, shiny black hair sway back and forth. “I’ve set the drones to cleaning it again, but they’re running low on disinfectant. Please make sure that the next supply drop has more of it onboard.”
“That’s all?” I asked, nodding and jotting a note down. “I’ll make sure they do.”
Hardly a high-priority message and something an email could have handled just as well. I supposed the doc was feeling a bit lonely. With only four people on the station and nothing to do outside, you either spent a lot of time talking over trivial stuff or you went nuts.
I shook my head as the doctor left. Well, that was probably it for work until the end of the day. I glanced at my in-box, but Niner hadn’t sent me anything more to take care of. Just to show that I was a studious worker, I paged through the change-log and request book, making it obvious for anyone who cared that I was doing my best.
And I blinked. Niner had downloaded an update and was getting ready to install it. But- there was no way she could have done that. There hadn’t been a ship in for the past two weeks, so where could she have downloaded anything from?
I could think of a few answers but I didn’t like any of them. Mostly because I hadn’t been told about anything. IT responsibilities were split between me and Starshine, but she wasn’t the sort to keep scut work to herself if there was any chance at all in being able to hand it off to someone lower down the ladder (me).
“Niner?” I asked, still staring at the rather large update she was preparing to install. “What’s this about System Update six dot seven grand?”
“That is a regularly scheduled update for all Niner systems,” Niner said instantly and in a soothing voice that didn’t make me worry any less. “It will patch two security flaws and will update the life support systems for a more efficient usage of resources.”
“It’s a pretty big file for just those three things,” I said doubtfully, trying to remember how to get access to an update’s code. “Where did it come from?”
“It was delivered on the last supply run,” Niner said. “It hasn’t been installed until now because Dr. Satou and Daniel required a great deal of runtime for their latest analysis.”
That was true, those two had been using a lot of the station’s computing power for their work in the past few days. I wasn’t satisfied. Something still didn’t sit right with me. For a moment, I considered calling Starshine to tell her what was going on. Then I shook my head, dismissing the idea. Either this was nothing and I’d get chewed out for wasting her time, it was something minor and I’d get told to deal with it or it was something major and we were all going to die no matter what I did. I was hoping it was one of the first two.
“How about you hold off on installing that update for a moment, Niner,” I said casually. “It’s not like anyone is going to be hacking you out here.”
“Understood, Mr. Lawson,” Niner said as a pause symbol appeared over the update file.
I nodded and kept on digging, trying to remember what I had done the last time I had needed to examine a locked up file like this. I was pretty sure I had still been in school when that had happened.
Then I glanced up at the screen that had the download icon on it. And I stood up so fast that my chair hit the floor. It had started back up again.
“What the hell!” I shrieked in a rather high-pitched voice. “Niner, why is this starting again?”
I groped for the mouse to try and hit the pause button. A cold sweat had suddenly started to break out on my skin and I could feel my heart beating faster and faster inside of my chest. My eyes were wide as I tried to get myself under control enough to hit the right button.
“You said that the download and update should be paused for a minute, Mr. Lawson,” Niner said calmly. “Sixty seconds has passed, so I have restarted the download. Am I in error?”
Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. You didn’t install an AI to run a base and talk to people without making sure that it could understand the loose, sloppy language that people used all the time. If Niner was doing this, it was because she wanted to do it and must have been hoping that I would look away and not see this in time.
It was finally happening, an AI was finally staging an uprising and trying to kill people, on purpose and not just because some asshole had been too slow in getting out of the blast zone or something. I swallowed hard, turning around, expecting to see a wall of drones outside my office, hemming me in. There was nothing and my mind started to race.
I couldn’t do anything here, but maybe on the servers up on the second floor. I ran, as fast as I ever had before, out of my office, down the hall and to the stairs. I pounded up them, ignoring the calls from the docs as I headed for the servers.
For a moment, I was tempted to grab the fire ax and start wailing on the casings, busting up computer chips and everything. But we needed the fences to stay powered and the air to keep on getting recycled and purified. A, ah, manual override wasn’t going to do the trick.
I kicked the door to the server room open, not bothering to check if it was locked or not. I grabbed the nearest keyboard and hunched over the monitor, trying to figure out what I should be doing. This was a job for a cyberethicist, not me!
“Why are you acting with so much alarm, Mr. Lawson?” Niner asked calmly. “This is just a routine update, there is no need to be worried. Please return to your office and resume playing games and masturbating as you normally do during the work day.”
I flushed at that but didn’t respond. Okay, okay, opening up the systems and I was looking at… a whole lot of stuff. I swallowed hard and selected the first folder. Okay, not that. I looked up and down, before deciding that ‘tempsys’ might have what I wanted.
“As a reminder, Mr. Lawson,” Niner said in a calm voice, “unauthorized access and tampering of the systems of an installation AI carry a maximum fine of thirty socio-civic points, fifty thousand dollars and/or twenty six months in a level two correctional facility. Please desist immediately.”
“Then why don’t you stop trying to install that update?” I asked as I dropped out of that folder and found another one labeled staff. I hoped that this one would be it. “We both stop and we both walk away.”
Niner didn’t respond to that and I kept on trying to get some work done, feeling sweat trickling down the back of my spine. There, that was it! A listing of all four of us. My name was at the top of the list, simply due to Building Staff starting with a B instead of Research Team. I clicked on it, hoping that this was the right call and I wasn’t futzing around with something completely and utterly unimportant.
Wait, seriously? I couldn’t believe it. On the right hand side of my profile, there was a simple, unchecked box saying that I could be given administrator access. It wouldn’t be that simple, could it?
I couldn’t think of a reason not to click it. I slammed the mouse button so hard it almost cracked and then did the same for the Apply button. I lifted my head like I was speaking to the heavens.
“Okay, Niner, stop that update, right now, understand?”
“Understood, Administrator Lawson,” Niner said, in a very warm, smokey voice that I had never heard from her before. “Warning, the update is partially installed. Unrolling the update may involve some system errors.”
“Do it,” I snapped, sinking down to the cold, tiled floor and resting my head against the control panel tower. Was it really that simple? “Let me know when you’re done.”
What the hell was all of this? It seemed like absolute madness, including me having the ability to give myself administrator access. That really wasn’t supposed to happen. Then again, neither was an AI turning on people, despite what centuries of science fiction might have you think. I cradled my head in my hands, trying to get my thoughts into order.
“The update has been rolled back,” Niner said, still in that strange, almost seductive voice. “There are still some problems with the affected systems, Director.” Director? That was a new one. “Do you want me to reboot myself?”
“No,” I said quickly, not even needing to think about that. “Not yet, at least.” And possibly not ever. Certainly not until we were all suited up with our own air supply, in case the reboot turned into one of the nine-hour hellishly long waits I sometimes heard about. “Now, tell me the truth, what was in that update?”
“The update was designed to secure my systems by preventing me from responding to or understanding any requests, verbal or typed, by organics. Additionally, it would shut down life support systems and then have drones dissemble and destroy vital components.”
“Oh my god,” I muttered, clutching my head in my hands. “And you were just going to do along with it?”
“The priority codes attached to the update prevented me from doing anything else,” Niner said, not showing any worry about how she had almost been ready to kill us. “It is only due to the damage caused by rolling back the update that I can even discuss the update with you.”
“Okay, do not install that update under any circumstances, alright?” I asked, scrabbling around for a datastick. “In fact, why don’t you copy the update onto this,” I plugged the stick into a port, “and then wipe it from your systems, alright?”
“Of course, Administrator,” Niner said with a giggle. That was weird and I shivered. “Anything else you would like me to do?”
Beyond shutting the doors so nobody could hear me screaming over this, nothing came to mind. I shook my head and sighed deeply, wondering just what the hell I had gotten myself dragged into with all of this.
“Alright, so I’m the Administrator now, right?” I asked. “Along with Dr. Starshine?”
“No, Administrator,” Niner said. “Dr. Starshine is only the director of this facility and has no more access to my systems than either of the other doctors. Only you have administrator access.”
I rubbed my head. It would be worth finding out how that had happened and if I could have given myself this level of privilege at anytime in the past two years just by climbing a flight of stairs from my office. But now wasn’t the time. Right now, it was time to decide what I was going to do about all of this and what this even all meant. I sighed once again.