Plan 16D - Unexpected Rogue SecUnits at Extraction Zone
Rating and Warnings: Not Rated, Gen, No Warnings Apply
Tags: The Corporation Rim Is Terrible (Murderbot Diaries), featuring: secunit plans, and plans going awry, Corporate Espionage, Post-Book 7: System Collapse
Published: 2025/01/31
Word Count: 3647
Murderbot and ART are on a corporate espionage mission and the plan is perfect and they have thought of every eventuality. Except maybe a few.
For DeadlyChildArtemis. Your prompts were delightful! The idea of MB and Three working at cross purposes with their respective asshole research transports made me laugh a lot and I had to make it happen.
Thank you to TheJackalopePrince for beta! And thank you to the Murderbot 2.0 discord for being an endless source of inspiration and motivation ❤️
Originally published on Ao3 for the 2025 Murderbot Diaries New Year Fic Exchange
In my defense, the plan was perfect. It was a good SecUnit plan: no casualties, keeping people safe, not getting discovered. The only thing it didn't account for was the appearance of a rogue SecUnit.
It definitely didn’t account for the appearance of multiple.
We had safely infiltrated MinWelKan’s research facility. “We” meaning me and a mini ART-drone it had spun up for the mission (the drone had to be a normal size for a normal SecUnit to be using, so it had way less arms and knives than last time, but somehow still managed to be just as much of an asshole as when it was full size). I once again looked like a governed SecUnit, which was really the easiest part of the mission, even with Iris and Martyn and ART and even Tarik worrying at me whenever the topic came up in mission planning. I was in armor again, matching the armor of the on-site SecUnits. We’d even altered my body’s code again so I stopped growing hair, just in case I needed to take my helmet off.
(It didn’t seem fair, that I felt uncomfortable when my hair grew and also uncomfortable when it didn’t. (It was fine. I was fine.))
I was tapped into the site’s SecSystem and HubSystem, scrubbing myself from cameras and making sure to never be in the same room or on the same local transport as other SecUnits, listening in on all the orders they were given by humans and tracking patrol patterns. I was relying on the fact that humans didn’t really pay attention to SecUnits: if we weren’t all in one place, they were never going to keep track of how many of us there were, so an extra one wouldn’t be noticed.
The MinWelKan facility was basically an entire moon, orbiting around a planet that was covered in farming installations. It contained all the administrative staff for the planet, company managers and executives’ offices, research stations, and data storage. Pretty much everything that made MinWelKan a company, though with any luck it wouldn’t be a company much longer.
I was heading for the data storage area, but had to keep taking detours to avoid humans and SecUnits. I had the facility map up, but ART had figured out a way to interface with my vision filters and project a path in front of me. I could have navigated myself, but this did give me more mental space to monitor SecSys and HubSys. A facility this big used a lot of SecUnits. A third of them or so had set patrol patterns, and another third were waiting in the ready room, but the other third were running errands and guarding various humans, which made them a lot less predictable.
There were also ComfortUnits, because of course there were. They were tied in with HubSys and mostly seemed to stay in their owners’ quarters, but I had set alerts if any of them changed position or entered a certain radius to me.
It was a lot to track, so it was nice that ART was taking care of the routing.
And to think you were going to go in with no support at all.
I’d have made it work. I’ve done lots of solo missions before.
But the point is you don’t have to.
Anyway. There was really no reason for a SecUnit to be in the data storage area, so we needed to be extra careful. Right now I looked like a SecUnit under the armor, so trying to pass as a human wouldn’t work. There was even less reason for a SecUnit to be interfacing with the data towers, but that was where the data we needed was.
Were.
Shut up, ART.
MinWelKan had been sniffing around PSUMNT’s activities recently. They probably assumed PSUMNT was dabbling in strange synthetics or alien remnants, not developing hyper-advanced AIs and letting them run loose in ships across the galaxy (with their very own debris deflectors), but either way we didn’t want them finding anything, and there had already been a couple close calls. So we were here to destroy their existing research, plant contradictory evidence, and hopefully find some dirt of our own to use against them. Obviously we couldn’t just delete what they had: that would be too obvious. ART had put together a code bundle. Smart like killware, but not actually killware: its job was to live in MinWelKan’s systems, destroying data linkages and corrupting data (about both PSUMNT and random other topics, to obscure the trail), so that nobody in MinWelKan would actually be able to draw any dangerous conclusions. We just needed a physical connection with the data towers to upload it.
The code bundle (named MalAdroIT (short for Malware: Adroit InTerceptor (guess who named it, and no, ART, I don’t care what “adroit” means, don’t tell me))) was currently sharing head space with me, which was another reason I was very glad ART was navigating. It wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t trying to destroy my data, it was just…waiting. I felt it as an itch inside my body, especially anywhere I had physical ports. It wanted to move.
The main entrance into the data center wasn’t guarded: it just required a keycard and biometrics scan. We could have fooled it, but that would take time, and it was in a busy corridor. Our entry route instead was going to be straight from one of my serials: through the vents, which for some reason were actually large enough to fit a person. ART steered me past the main entrance when nobody was around. It looked weird somehow, but nothing was immediately dangerous. I couldn’t place it.
I passed the main entrance, hacked past a keycard scanner into a small side room, shut the door behind me, and climbed up on a desk to access the vent. ART-drone helped collect the screws and pull the vent up after me once I’d entered, and I crawled forward as quietly as possible (not exactly easy with armor on). MalAdroIT started vibrating inside my head as we got closer to its mission. I told it that I needed to concentrate and it subsided a little.
We reached a vent into the data storage area and ART-drone darted through the gap in the vents to open it. There were no people inside right now, since we’d timed our arrival to be during a break. Things were going so smoothly that I almost started getting worried, but like I said, the plan was perfect. (Look, at some point we have to stop accounting for potential disruptions to the plan. We didn’t have “what should we do if multiple rogue SecUnits show up” just like we didn’t have “what do we do if the planet the facility is orbiting explodes.” The plan was as perfect as we could make it. That didn’t stop me from worrying.)
I dropped down into the room, and, oh. That’s what was weird about this area. Everything was too big. It was as if they realized they needed the room to be larger while designing it, so they just scaled everything up proportionally. The main entrance had looked weird because the door was about 40% larger than any other door in the facility. The vents had been scaled up as well, and now I could use them to access the servers. Maybe humans shouldn’t do their own facility design either.
The room had multiple levels of metal-grate floors, accessible via stairs that were again 40% larger than they should be. It was packed full of data towers, with barely enough room to move between each row. I released several more drones and sent them to scout the room. We should be alone here, but there was always a chance we’d missed something. The room was just as empty as it appeared, and I made my way to the nearest access console, peeling back the skin on my forearm to expose a data port and connecting directly to the data tower. I half expected the port to be the wrong size, but luckily they’d only scaled up the room and not the equipment. MalAdroIT jumped across the gap joyfully and got to work on its mission, and I started searching for any other incriminating evidence to use against MinWelKan.
I hadn’t been with ART and its crew on many missions yet, but they had already taught me a lot about the way corporates worked. None of them could resist the urge to dabble in strange synthetics or alien remnants, even when they all agreed that it was forbidden and would gleefully jump on the opportunity to take a rival company down for doing the exact same thing. Some were researching it, some selling it, some just collecting. Generally, information about it would be buried in a nondescript location, like “Audit Record Archives” or “Company Picnic Photos,” somewhere nobody would bother to look. I set a search up to look for typical keywords and for financial or inventory data in folders where it shouldn’t be, and set it running, borrowing some of ART-drone’s processing space to speed things up. While that ran, I found the company’s roster and added a fake employee who would be our mole, leaking the info to the media without involving PSUMNT at all. It would be Good-In-A-Pinch Widely’s job to take MinWelKan down, and then to disappear.
When ART’s crew and I had planned this mission, we’d realized I was the only one who could do it (well, me and ART-drone). The data could be accessed from anywhere in the facility (if you could hack in past password locks), but we needed a physical connection to upload MalAdroIT, and I was best suited to infiltrate. Humans couldn’t run the data search: we couldn’t set it up ahead of time because it had to interface with MinWelKan’s network structure. They definitely couldn’t scrub themselves from cameras and systems as well as I could. ART-drone was well set for data analysis but couldn’t get in and out on its own safely, and a human wouldn’t have a reason to be carrying a drone around, or to be walking around the facility without raising suspicion. This was a mission that Perihelion’s crew couldn’t do without me. It was a weird feeling, being needed. I had a place on this crew, and not just because ART likes me.
Aha, got you. My search had turned up a hit: transaction records from three years ago with a company that had been caught a few months back for trading in alien remnants (obviously that company did regular business, too, but if this was just regular business, they wouldn’t have stored the data in a file called “inventory - misc - 38952173x4c”). The products they’d bought weren’t labeled as alien remnants, but they were marked as still on inventory. I ran a second search for any research, other transactions, or communications tied to the alien remnant SKUs, and a couple minutes later I had a pile of incriminating files copied onto a data storage card.
ART-drone had been amusing itself running a patrol pattern along with my other drones, but had been looking over my shoulder while I searched. It pointed at one file in the pile, an employee ID number tagged with “REDUNDANT - Deacquisition Scheduled.” I converted the scheduled date from MinWelKan’s calendar into galactic standard. It was…tomorrow. This person, probably a loose end from the alien remnants purchase, was going to be disappeared tomorrow. Xe probably didn’t even know what xe had helped purchase: hir title was listed as “Assistant Deputy Logistics Associate.” Xe wasn’t leadership, xe was a disposable pawn.
Damn it.
ART.
It shouldn’t be possible for the drone form of a ship AI to snort, but it somehow managed it. Of course. We will switch to plan 4F - Unplanned Retrieval. The human is scheduled to report for a “performance review” in 47 minutes. We can intercept them on the way there.
I told you our plan was perfect. As if we wouldn’t account for needing to rescue a human.
I disconnected from the data tower, scrubbing evidence of my presence on the way out. Good luck, MalAdroIT. It was doing its job by now, I assumed, but part of its job was to stay invisible, so it was hard to tell. ART-drone came buzzing cheerfully back from its patrol when I recalled the other drones. We had to take a different route out of the data storage room, climbing up several awkwardly large flights of stairs and crossing to a different vent. ART started navigating me again and I was able to focus more on monitoring for SecUnits, ComfortUnits, and humans and augmented humans, as I dropped down into an empty office.
We moved quickly to the interception point and I found another office to wait in until the human passed by. HubSys registered hir door opening, and xe appeared on the nearest camera a few seconds later. ART oh-so-helpfully projected an enormous countdown into my vision, telling me when to move.
Then, at 2.7 seconds remaining, with the human almost to the door I was behind, a klaxon started blaring, warning lights started flashing, and a message popped up through SecSys: ATMOSPHERE LEAK DETECTED: SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. The human stopped, just out of grabbing range, looked around frantically, and started speed walking in the other direction, probably to the nearest atmosphere shelter. Shit. I admit our plans didn’t include the option of human retrieval and facility alarms happening at the same time. We would need to improvise.
The human had made it three steps away. The hallway was still clear but it wouldn’t stay that way. I pushed through the door and caught up to the human, running alongside hir. “Excuse me. The atmosphere leak is blocking access to the nearest shelter. Please follow me to a safe shelter location.”
Xe startled when I appeared, but nodded. “Okay, show me.”
I was counting on the fact that xe wouldn’t be paying attention to hir surroundings if I was leading hir. I led hir on a confusing path that just happened to avoid other humans, while still hopefully being convincingly close. ART-drone and I had entered the facility via the cargo receiving bay, but that was too far away and not suitable for a human who needed atmosphere to breathe. The commercial shuttle bay was fairly close and would be empty: generally, safety protocols directed humans to shelter away from exits, in case a leak like this was caused by an attack by raiders or another company staging a hostile takeover. Through SecSys I could see SecUnits directing humans away from the shuttle bay and forming a safety perimeter, but there was still a gap that we could squeeze through. SecSys reported that the leak was in another part of the facility, so there should be no issue with us leaving from here.
The human started glancing at me in concern as we got closer to the shuttle bay, but was too used to following orders from SecUnits to actually stop. As long as I kept moving purposefully, xe would probably follow me all the way to the shuttle. We had discussed me entering the facility disguised as a human, but the SecUnit disguise had definitely been the better choice. Also, this human would have probably walked straight into hir own execution if we hadn’t grabbed hir.
Xe finally got concerned enough to let out a quiet, “um…” as we entered the shuttle bay proper. Before xe could finish whatever xe was about to say, though, I ran directly into a human.
What?
ART, buzzing ahead, echoed, What?
I stopped and pulled my human behind me. This new human was invisible to ART’s cameras and to HubSys and SecSys, and had no ID. ART hadn’t seen them. They should not be here.
Our plan also did not include rescuing two humans, but we can modify it.
Hang on ART, something isn’t right.
They were also almost exactly my size. Just slightly taller.
The human blinked at me, muttered, “Did we miss one…?” and then, inexplicably, pinged me and sent a small data packet over the feed, tagged HIGH URGENCY and SUPERVISOR OVERRIDE. If I’d been one of MinWelKan’s SecUnits, I’d have had to open it. ART grabbed the packet, isolated it, and pulled it apart. I already knew what it would find, though. Fuck.
“What the fuck are you doing here.”
The human - and it was obviously not a human, now that I knew who I was looking at, it was Three - startled, then grinned at me (how does it always manage to look natural doing that?). “We’re on a mission. What are you doing here?”
“Same thing,” I muttered. Do you have an extraction route?
Of course. Holism is in the shuttle in bay 08, ready to take off when everyone is on board. It’s also controlling three other shuttles, to hold everyone. We’re tightening the net now.
Wait. We? Everyone? How many of you are there?
It peeked around me to my human and waved. “Hello. I know this is unexpected, but your life is in danger here. This SecUnit will protect you, but you need to get on that shuttle over there.” Me, Holism, and every SecUnit and ComfortUnit in the facility. My human waved back, probably thinking this was the strangest day of hir life.
What.
What.
ART sent a somehow affronted ping to the ship Holism was in. Holism (probably also in a drone?) pinged back, somehow conveying smug delight in the exact time interval it waited.
(Okay, so apparently our plan 1: wasn’t perfect, and 2: needed to account for a lot more edge cases. Like, I guess, an entire other competing mission being carried out by another rogue-SecUnit-and-obnoxious-ship-AI pair, on the same station at the same time. Did PSUMNT not communicate between ships? Technically Holism and ART were in different departments in the university, but this should not have happened.)
(Now that I was thinking about it, this could have gone really badly. Three had fooled SecSys and hidden both it and all the other constructs’ locations. It was just luck that I hadn’t run into any of them on the way here. We needed plans that didn’t just rely on SecSys and HubSys to tell us where things were.)
My human was looking between the two of us, waiting for instructions from me. Xe had no reason to trust me, except the atmosphere leak alarms were still going off and I hadn’t put hir in danger yet (and I had MinWelKan armor on). I didn’t have time to have an emotion about that right now. I turned to hir. “Eden here is correct. We will be safe on the shuttle and I will explain everything.” Xe swallowed and nodded.
Well, with all the constructs in the facility freed (assuming we could trust them), the plan was simpler, in a way. Three and I established a feed connection (ART and Holism had been bickering nonstop since their first pings) and compared extraction plans. Three and Holism’s plan was a little more showy, but it had also been a backup. Apparently their original mission had been to “liberate” some proprietary scientific data on wormhole construction and decay methods. MinWelKan had been using it to generate short-term wormholes to avoid paying import duties, and also to obtain information on their competitors, and PSUMNT wanted a copy so they could duplicate the research independently and get rid of MinWelKan’s advantage.
Liberating every SecUnit and ComfortUnit in the facility had not been part of the plan. Not that I have much room to talk.
The extraction was easy, after that. Three and I split up control of the other shuttles in the bay and programmed them to launch at semi-random intervals in overlapping (but not intersecting) flight paths over the next ten minutes, with our shuttles scheduled to leave within the chaos. I tapped into HubSys and made it think that ships were being launched from the cargo bay at the other end of the facility, to draw attention away from us, then planted an error to make it look as if the shuttles in this bay had been launched by accident. Three recalled the other SecUnits and they boarded the shuttles. Then it sent me a data packet to scatter around into HubSys: traces of what looked like malware, which would have the same digital footprint as the code that had set off the atmosphere leak alarm, and would look like a widespread governor module hack.
ART and Holism argued over which of them, one hiding on the opposite side of the planet and one in an asteroid belt that ART told me used to be the planet’s actual moon, would pick us up. Holism won, because ART and I didn’t want to take responsibility for all the constructs. I tried to ignore how my performance reliability had jumped two points the moment I realized Three was here. ART wasn’t ignoring it, though: it and Holism had (while still bickering) opened up a separate planning document to set up ongoing communication between their departments, and to seek out missions that would be best served with two SecUnits working in concert.
Once we had all boarded (my human getting more and more wide-eyed as xe realized just how many constructs were here, and that xe had just let hirself get kidnapped), Holism-drone launched the shuttles. Our escape was disguised, and our data extraction/corruption was well hidden, and the loss of all the constructs would look like an attempted sabotage by a rival company.
So ART’s and my plan wasn’t perfect, and neither was Three and Holism’s, but between the four of us, we had a perfect plan in the end.
Not shown: Seth losing an argument with ART about how it knows it has to file all plans for anti-corporate activity with the university's Schemes Department! It's there for exactly this reason! Holism filed its plan! They could have coordinated! and then rubbing his temples and wondering how he got to this point in his life where he's arguing with a hyper-intelligent AI, that is also his child, about paperwork.