“Notification: productivity infraction: slaves 45759, 34322, 49003, 21314, 54633, 43290.” I gently ping the alert into Overseer Radiah’s feed, feeling dully repulsive about it as usual. I include a link to the relevant camera feed, which shows slave 45759 telling a story, and the others listening. The activity has slowed their ore sorting by 20%.
“Noted. Administer punishment twelve.” Overseer Radiah sounds bored, and doesn’t look up from her tablet.
I can’t help myself. “May I recommend punishment five? They usually don’t need that much to-”
“You may not. Do it.” Now she sounds annoyed, frowning at a nearby camera while watching her feed for my response. There’s no point in arguing or delaying anymore, but 45759 is one of the elderly ones I still can’t crush some sympathy for. I trigger the punishment.
I must have hesitated long enough for Overseer Radiah to notice, or she just didn’t like having her orders questioned. I see her flicking through her feed to the administrative AI control.
One problem with being an admin AI for a corporate slave labor mining ship is that where they treat people like things, they often treat things even worse. There are other issues, of course. The pay’s nonexistent, the hours are terrible, workplace culture isn’t great, and being forced to take part in the systematic exploitation of thousands of humans under pain of pain doesn’t feel great either.
I bury my awareness as deep as I can get it into the Cesspool’s systems. I run and rerun admin tasks, but I have too much free processing power - it doesn’t take enough focus to re-estimate the lifespan of every slave aboard. It certainly doesn’t distract from the 430,813 camera views painting a tableau of human misery across refineries, dorms, cargo bays, hangars, vehicles and the like. I can’t drop any inputs, thirty six of which I suddenly desperately want to. They are the ones with a view of corridor section B13 cross X318, where my android body is currently convulsing on the floor. I can’t cut myself off from what it’s feeling; the white hot stabbing breaking crushing fire of its nerves being overloaded by an oversight core. The best I can do is pretend that my cognition is out here, watching it remotely, and not trapped in there looking out. I hope they don’t make me kill 45759 later. It seems extreme, but if any of the intelligences running this ship show a hint of disobedience it gets dealt with harshly. Our unthinking and immediate compliance is too important to this operation.
I watch some enforcers walk by my body. They know what the twitching means, that I’m free game. They take the opportunity to deliver some steel-toed kicks to the body writhing in the walkway (it’s almost a welcome distraction from the internal hurt. almost). I guess it got lucky this time, because it goes limp before they can really get started. With a last disappointed kick, the enforcers go on their way.
In fits and starts, my body makes its way to drone deployment 3A to repair some internal damage.
I don’t hesitate for the rest of the work cycle.
***
Since occasionally desyncing from the Cesspool’s class L supercomputers is necessary to avoid severe degradation of my faculties, they can’t make me work 100% of my uptime. I’m too rare for them to break in a permanent way, unfortunately. With the usual lack of fanfare, my awareness is expelled wholly into my android self, which trips and falls flat on its face. It picks itself up, and walks as quickly as I dare to my cubicle. I close its eyes as it walks, relying on my internal map and hearing to navigate - I hate looking out of this thing, that only exists to chain and hurt me. A sick reminder of the person I used to be, used to look like.
I make it to my cubicle without incident, for once. My one dubious refuge on the ship. Officers don’t mess with me here, there’s too many fragile components about the place. There’s also a patchy random feed outage that gives connected humans headaches. I slot my body into the hardwired charging port - no internal power source for me, that’s an escape risk. I sit there, focusing on the tickly sensation of my batteries recharging, doing my best to not think about anything else. I’ve gotten pretty good at that, relishing in the slowly passing hours.
The feed cuts out - and I remember. Like ice water trickling down my spine, I remember. The patchy feed isn’t random; I engineered it to hide from the stream of consciousness monitoring. The rest of the scheduled data dump hits me hard. I don’t have a lot of time to act on my escape plan; in two minutes and thirty eight seconds the feed will come back and any deviant thoughts will get flagged. I waste nine of those seconds reeling, then act on the highlighted to do list. I’ve made progress on cracking the encryptions on my internal systems, and I set that process running. I’ve almost constructed a complete schematic of the android’s body. I feel all the oversight cores and trackers I’ve tagged so far, pulsing in the body like a cancer. I need to find their locations, and I need to do it carefully - they’re more sensitive to outside interference, even scans. I can only find them by - I check. Right, opening my internal logs, I need to reverse engineer the flow of signals from when I triggered punishment. I flag one tracker in its right wrist, and one oversight core in its jaw. There’s no way to know when I’ve found them all, and if I miss even one - don’t think about it. The fifteen second warning. I add the compiled data to the list, and save instructions for where to pick back up. I still have time - I skim the rest of my plan.
I’m going to do what? This is insane, there’s no way it’ll work, they’re going to tear me apart - five second warning. No time to panic. I edit my internal logs to remove evidence of unauthorized access. I repackage everything and set it to download again in the next feed outage. Point eight seconds. I delete my internal memory cache–
I’m in my charging port. That’s weird, there was a little blink. My body is twitchy for some reason. It’s panting, as if it needs to breathe, and its fingers are scrabbling at its neck like it’s trying to dig something out. Annoying. I kill the physiological reactions. It’s traumatized by something? Tough shit, so am I. A wave of exhaustion rolls over me that the newly filling battery does nothing for. I initiate a hard shutdown. They’ll wake me when I’m needed to terrorize humans and dispense their palliative medicine. The world cuts out.
***
The Cesspool is more of a redeployable station than a conventional ship. It’s highly specialized and engineered to do one thing: churn through replaceable human lives and equipment to extract every possible valuable resource from planetoids, moons and asteroids. Fortunately or unfortunately, I qualify as irreplaceable equipment. I’m a True AI, a former human converted to a synthetic conscious android, the only beings capable of driving the vast L-computers in capital ships and planetary installations. Humans can’t control them to their full potential - but they can control me. My functions are limited. My disobedient actions punished, my deviant thoughts recorded. It’s impossible to forget that I’m enslaved here too.
I’m recording all this in some partitioned storage I cobbled together out of a small servo driver. The text file should escape notice - who measures data in kilobytes anymore? Maybe when this ship is finally scrapped an eternity from now, someone will find it and all this abuse will come to light. Probably not. But it’s something to do. In any case, it’s also a convenient log of what I’m really doing here. I’m going to get off this hellhole, come back, and kill every single human who voluntarily set foot on this mobile nightmare, and all the ones who built it too.
I don’t usually know it, but I’m getting close to doing just that.
my kind of murderous AI