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I should have predicted the cave in. I was the one who had been stationed at multiple mining facilities. I was the one who planned security for this mission. Who had thought it was safe enough that Three and I could split up to scout ahead and look for survivors. But when I heard the telltale rumble and told Three it needed to get back now, it was far too late to do any good.
The tremors stopped after an objective 10 seconds and subjective cycles worth of anxiety. It was dark and the dust hung heavy in the air. I activated a light pack and let my low light filters do the rest. The tunnel I was in had somehow remained stable though the path forward and back were closed with rocks. The feed had gone dead so I couldn’t even reach out to ART to let it know the situation. My ping to Three for a status report also went unanswered. I turned my back on the exit and started carefully calculating which rocks I could displace without bringing the roof down on us (again).
By the time I found Three, the feed had been dead for four hours and I had already gingerly crawled through six tunnels, having dug or used low energy blasts to clear a path. It was slow going and multiple times I had to stop as new tremors wracked the passage. I created a subroutine to send a ping to the surface every 5 minutes. Nothing. My second subroutine sent a ping to Three. Also nothing. For four hours I was convinced I was alone, that Three was dead, that ART wouldn’t be able to find me. I kept crawling forward. When I felt the local network establish and received a quiet ping from Three’s last known location, my performance reliability rose by 2.5%.
The collapsed room I found Three in, had been pitch black and was now only illuminated by the glow of my light pack. It took me a moment to find it, buried as it was under several large rocks. The fact that it was still buried was a worrying sign. It either meant the rocks on its legs were too heavy to move or its internal machinery was borked. Judging by the fluid and dents I could see - potentially both.
Three itself was in and out of involuntary shut down. I found myself glad that we’d both made the decision to get rid of our buffer phrases a few months ago. I didn’t want to hear it tell me to abandon it. Occasionally it would be alert and aware long enough to send me a ping. More often it seemed to awaken with its memory archives only partially initialised. In the time I took to evaluate whether moving the boulder would cause more damage or destabilise the entire room it had called me One, Two, 2.0 and Murderbot… normally I'd tell it not to call me that but...I was glad when it knew who i was.
It didn’t seem able to respond to my requests for up to date diagnostics so I pushed at its firewalls to hopefully skim the diagnostics off the top. I hoped it wouldn't mind. I would but...Three was less of an asshole than me. When I gently probed its firewall I didn’t expect it to just drop them all at once to give me full access. Nor the howling pain of its still active pain sensors that it couldn’t seem to work out how to turn down. Using my access I manually tuned them but even at minimal allowed levels it was in a lot of pain.
I still wasn’t sure if I should move the boulder sitting on Three but it seemed to be the source of Three’s pain. Well, one of the sources. A major one. Sharing pain inputs was definitely a little more than scraping diagnostics but I didn’t think Three would mind given the circumstances. One of the half rotten planks that had once held up the ceiling here was large enough to serve as a lever. I wedged it in place and rolled the boulder of Three’s legs. There was 0.02 seconds of relief from Three and I thought I might have done the right thing. Right before the multiple alarms of toxins detected flooded its feed.
I hesitated for 0.4 seconds trying to work out where the alerts were coming from and in that time the toxins I’d stupidly released flooded Three’s system. Its pump, the one responsible for supplying blood to its organic tissue, spasmed and then stopped. Fuck.
I didn’t let myself waste anymore time. Three's chest cavity was already partially open from the force of the multiple impacts. I pulled it the rest of the way open and reached in to manually compress the pump while I initiated a toxin clean. Its systems started the cleanse, then stuttered, then stopped. Double fuck.
The feed was empty. I didn't have a Medsystem. Didn't have ART. And while I wanted to stop and curse my shitty education modules for putting me in this situation: I also didn't have time. Three didn't have time. Secunit mechanics are technically proprietary to the company that built them. Three and I weren't from the same company. But Secunit companies were also greedy and cheap. They’d rather copy an already functional system (with some modifications to protect from copyright and to make sure replacement parts were still proprietary) than design entirely new workings. So while I didn’t have Three’s manuals, mine should be enough to help me improvise something. Without ART, they would have to be.
The next few minutes passed in a blur of juryrigging connections, leaking fluids and elevated stress hormones I didn’t have time to purge. Three now sat in my lap, its internal fluid pumps hooked up to mine so I could manually flush its systems using my filter. Then the fluid was transported back to its system. It wasn't the best connection but I was no longer required to manually compress its pump to deliver fluids so...it was better.
I tried to ignore how much fluid had leaked onto Three, onto me. To ignore how close I was with Three's systems now. If before I'd just been skimming the edge, now we were fully integrated. I would have had to hack in so I could access all the systems I had needed to repair it if Three hadn't already given me full access so freely. I didn't know what to do with that. Three’s performance reliability was slowly creeping up if still abysmal. Despite having access to this, to its diagnostics, I still startled when Three began to stir again. The urge to grab at it, to stop it moving and disturbing the multiple connections now between it and I was strong. I suppressed it. I would panic if I woke up to somebody holding me. I didn’t want it to panic.
“Murderbot?”
I normally had to repress the urge to flinch when someone said my name. This time the urge to flinch combined with the sudden emotion that Three was awake again. Not only awake, but recognised me. The result was a weird shudder that had me freezing my movement code so I didn’t knock Three away from me. It weirdly seemed okay with our closeness. Even attempted to push in closer. Probably because it had lost the ability to thermoregulate. For my part I increased my body temperature and followed my initial instinct to hold it still since it didn’t seem like it was going to panic. It was...okay holding it for now. This was an emergency situation.
It watched me and I realised it was waiting for me to reply to it. “Yes?” I asked.
“Thank you for not leaving me.”
Not leaving it? I had almost killed it. My shitty lack of education modules, the fact my threat assessment had not predicted this collapse, that I had even let it come down here in the first place. But if I told it that...would it want to get away from me? I couldn't let it go. Not when I was connected to its main pump, taking over its pain sensors and getting repeat diagnostics every minute so I wouldn't miss whatever new disaster happened next. So instead I said, “That would be against your contract.” Probably not the reassurance it was looking for. I tried again, “ART won’t leave us either.”
My subroutine sent another automated ping out to the void. Still nothing. But I had to believe ART was out there working on getting us out of here. That at any moment I would feel its presence in my systems and know that we were saved. That Three was saved.
“That will be nice,” Three sighed, then went back into stasis. It hadn’t suffered any more catastrophic drops which I was choosing to take as a good sign. I hoped it was getting some rest. That its organics were letting it imagine it was somewhere else, not this shitty cave. I hoped ART would come soon. That it wouldn’t be too late. Settling as best I could against the wall without dislodging Three, I started the music from its favourite documentary in our shared feed. My own performance reliability dropped another point from the fluids I was transferring across. It was okay. ART was out there. For now I just had to hold Three and wait.