Chapter Text
"Inspector Rin, accidents–," the human who was talking to me (FeedID: Julius, ReMineDust Employee Position: Refinery 5 Primary Floor Manager, Pronouns: xe/xem) had a flicker of something that looked a lot like anger pass over xir face at the word 'accidents', "–happen sometimes. The losses are unfortunate, but as you can see, they haven't kept us from our required output."
"Accidents happen less when you have better safety precautions in place. That's why they sent me to this planet–moon in the first place," I responded. Shit. I was so focused on not calling it a "stupid planet" to Julius's face, which probably wouldn't make me seem like a legitimate Inspector, that I almost forgot we weren't even on a stupid planet. Coding in that one second delay on talking had been in my nonexistent to-do list for hundreds of cycles. I increased its nonexistent priority.
I needed to say something else to distract xem from that fuckup. The walkway we were on wound around a bunch of ventilation, overlooked the lower layer of the refinement facility, and was three meters above the floor. "You don't have any barriers here. That violates item–," I ran a quick query on the impressively sized file ART gave me earlier, "29.3 of ReMineDust's Loss-Prevention Policy.
"We are actively working to build them now. It hasn't stopped us from reaching our quotas," Julius responded. It was impressive how transparently xe was willing to lie to me, Inspector Rin, about the barriers they were very much not actively trying to build.
"The unprioritization of safety you all did made twenty people die." Unprioritization was probably a word. Shit, I had to be more in character than that. "And that's bad for the minimal death quotas." Nailed it.
Julius gritted xir teeth loud enough my hearing could pick up on it, and my threat assessment ticked up accordingly. "You have access to the incident report. There were only two platform falls."
It had been a second since I was around someone who would refer to humans dying as "only two platform falls." I was used to it, so it didn't bother me. "That's a bad excuse. You should've put ropes up, or something else that took less building. Set that as your first priority after we leave: putting barriers on anything higher than a meter off the ground."
"Yes, Inspector Rin," Julius responded, at a speed that seemed almost reflexive. Then, after a beat, "The loss-prevention policy states that we should only concern ourselves with platforms two meters or higher. One meter would be a waste of resources, which are already in short supply."
"So you have read the policy? Do you know what else is a bigger waste of resources? Letting your employees die." That was probably in-character enough. That's what I was pretending to be here about.
"We are putting the company first, like we're supposed to. Again, our productivity hasn't suffered. We've even finally gotten ahead of KraftedOre!" Julius stared at me expectantly. I hated being stared at in general, but hated it even more when it was expectant.
"ReMineDust sent me about the deaths, not about the productivity," I told Julius, and watched xem actively deflate a bit at that. Xir tooth grinding recommenced.
"Right. What else do you want to know?" Julius's gaze moved itself to a point by my left shoulder. This was still uncomfortably close to my face, and also uncomfortably close to where I had hidden one of my drones, so it still just felt like xe was making eye contact. Great. I was glad, again, that Three volunteered to go be social and talk to the other employees, while I took the manager.
"Let's make a list of their locations in your office, then you can show me where they happened," I told xem. Did it make sense for us to have to go to xir office for that? Not really. Whatever. I'd been learning that sometimes if you just said shit with enough confidence, and people didn't know you were a SecUnit, they'd listen to you. It was kind of great.
"Yes, Inspector Rin." At this rate xe was going to wear xir back teeth to dust before this conversation was over. Xir eyes shifted to the floor, and I felt my performance reliability tick up a percentage point. (It was not doing phenomenally. All this staring was getting to me.)
It was nice getting listened to, even if the person who was listening to me was mad about it. It was also going to be nice to go somewhere with (hopefully) different air. I was getting really tired of smelling some kind of burning chemical that was coming from a slightly fucked up chimney thing next to where we were standing. That was probably what this walkway was actually for, to maintain the pipes coming out of all the machines on the ground. If I couldn't find anything in Julius's office, maybe I'd bring up something about chemical safety as an excuse to get into other areas of the facility.
Julius started to walk, and I followed xem. As we curled around the room, I looked down at the facility floor, catching a glimpse of Three standing next to some humans and a hauler bot. Three pinged me, and I pinged back. It sent me, Status?
Fine, I replied. I'm going to check for the protocols in Julius's office.
Acknowledged. I can cover this room.
It said that like there would be anything to cover in this room, which I doubted. Maybe it knew something I didn't, though. That had happened more than I'd like recently, particularly on missions where I needed to do things like "collaborate with people," and it usually led to me doing something stupid on accident. I prefer doing stupid things on purpose. I decided to ask, Have you found anything?
I think so? Have you talked to the hauler bots yet?
Shit, why didn't I think of that? Murderbot, you idiot, fifteen of the twenty deaths were hauler bot related. I pinged a hauler bot close to me. After about twice as long as it should've taken for it to respond, it sent me back a somewhat strangled ping four times in quick succession. Huh. Yeah, they seem weird.
I think it's worse than weird. I've been talking with one for the past couple minutes. It looks like they got some kind of update recently, but I think it was malware. Maybe not all malware, but at least partially malware. I’m looking into it.
Well fuck. That combination of words made something icy claw itself across and into the organics of my back. Don't accept any downloads from them.
I'll be careful. You be careful too.
I sent Three an acknowledgement ping, coupled with my low risk assessment output. It sent me an amusement sigil with a singular raised eyebrow. If the feed was any higher fidelity, it would've probably sent a short video file instead. (It had a surprising number of those?)
Julius and I continued to walk in silence along the unprotected metal sheet for a minute or so. I wished this stupid facility wasn't so paranoid about "proprietary information" that they physically feed-shielded the whole thing. I knew ART was floating not too far above us, but I suddenly felt really weird about not being able to talk to it. The skin of my exposed neck felt particularly bad, even though there was a collar and hair there and everything. Actually, all of my skin was starting to feel pretty bad. My performance reliability ticked back down. I hated stress responses. I needed to focus on something.
During any other mission, this little walk would've been a great time to get access to ReMineDust's systems and try to figure out where they stored their refinement protocols. Unfortunately, along with feed-shielding the building in general, a lot of their devices had such limited feed connectivity you could only access them from within the same room, or had no feed connectivity at all. This was extremely inconvenient. It meant I had to do awful things like observe my surroundings actively, and talk to people.
As we passed some of those tubes running up from the ground floor, some of the other ones let off that mellow burnt smell. I walked past those ones a bit faster, even though that occasionally brought me a little too close to Julius. Whenever I got too close, xe would whip xir head back to look at me. Threat assessment continued to creep up, as performance reliability wavered unsteadily. I couldn't tell how much of it was from me being looked at, and how much was the tiny part of me worried that Julius would lose xir balance and tick the death total up to twenty one.
Eventually, we made it to the other side of the large room. The walkway diverged into a set of stairs down to the floor level, and a hallway that continued into a series of offices. Julius's was the first one. The second we entered, I reached out and grabbed for a local feed. My hypothetical hands came up empty. Shit. On one hand, I kind of expected there wasn't going to be a shiny, easily accessible file architecture that pointed me directly to super_secret_illegal_protocol_about_refinement_with_strange_synthetics_here.prt, but I had apparently decided to hope a little bit. Hoping continually proved to be a bad idea. I guessed I would have to just ask more questions.
As we were still standing there by the entry to the door, I spoke up. "A lot of those hauler bot related deaths don't make any sense. Hauler bots know stacking height limits of their cargo, and a bunch of other safety related things. There are guidelines for materials storage that prevent things from falling and crushing someone."
Oops, I was sounding like I cared too much about the people in the facility. I followed up with, "Violating those guidelines may lead to product damage. I would suggest you reread items 84.21, 84.53, and 84.94 from the ReMineDust Loss-Prevention Policy."
Julius intently stared at my shoulder, making excruciating eye (drone) contact with me again. Then xe made a quick movement behind me to shut the door, and the resulting jump in threat assessment didn't help the growing "maybe there are small fauna inside of my skin" situation. Julius rapidly moved away from the door to sit down in the chair on the far side of xir desk, while I took the one closest to the door. I had to abort a reflex to set my heels up on the desk between us.
"Right. Well, as you know, there are lots of gravity fluctuations on this moon," Julius began, somewhat stilted.
There were? I didn't think I knew enough about moons to know if that was a thing that could happen to a moon. I could've asked ART, if this was a normal mission. Maybe Three would know, it liked learning stuff like that. Julius kept talking, but I could just play it back in a couple seconds at 10x speed, and xe wouldn't know the difference.
Does it make sense for this moon to have gravity fluctuations? I sent Three, before I could convince myself not to bother it. It probably wouldn't be bothered. It actually seemed to prefer to be super chatty during missions, especially with me, which was taking some adjustment.
Like gravity being different in different spots? Or like tides? It responded.
Like something that could make hauler bots do stupid shit, I sent back.
Probably not? It seemed spherical enough as we flew in, and its geothermal signatures [...]
Yeah that was all I needed to know. Julius would get suspicious if I took too long anyway. In the style of a buffer message, I sent Unit Occupied: Client Assistance Required, and I backburnered the conversation. (How did it know about this moon's geothermal signatures? Did it ask ART stuff like that now? Should I be asking ART stuff like that? It probably didn't matter, if ART wanted me to know something, it would just tell me.)
After rapidly catching myself up on a sentence and a half of Julius bullshitting, I cut xem off. "There aren't gravity fluctuations on this moon."
Julius froze, and stopped blinking. Xir gaze moved from its locked position on my left shoulder-drone to my right one, then to the door behind me, before finally settling back on the desk in front of us. "Sorry, I had to check my translation software, it's a subscription model that requires better feed access than we have at this facility. I meant earthquakes, or impacts from space debris, things like that."
That sounded like additional bullshit, but I wanted to see how far xe would go with this. Maybe I could get xem to talk xemself into a corner. (It was a tactic used a lot in courtroom scenes in Sanctuary Moon, which was maybe useless for real life application, but also sometimes by Pin-Lee, so maybe it would actually hold up here.)
"Let me pull up the debris report, and compare times of the incidents," I said.
I did not have a debris report. I didn't even know if they made debris reports, but I was pretty sure hauler bots weren't flipping over (Death count: 4) because a meteor/oid/ite hit the ground. They especially weren't accelerating into people (Death Count: 3) because something from space hit the ground. Didn't places like this have shielding for stuff like that anyway?
"Most of them were earthquakes actually. All of them, sorry. There's been a lot going on lately. The times on the debris report wouldn't match." Julius's arms were crossed, and xe was digging xir fingers visibly into xemself.
"I'll pull up the ground disruption report, then." Ground disruption was even shittier of a report name than debris report, but if Julius called me on that, I could just blame xir translator. If xe called me on that, xe'd just be calling xemself. If the earthquakes were so bad they were causing this, they'd probably be causing damage to a bunch of other systems too. Everything else (aside from maybe that weird chemical smell that I thankfully had a brief reprieve from with the closed door of Julius's office) seemed mostly fine.
Julius pitched xir voice down a bit, even though the door was shut. "You've spent a lot of time in facilities like this, a lot of the employees are irresponsible. They don't put in enough effort, and they're so bad at resource allocation that they don't buy the stimulants they need to be alert."
I blinked, what the fuck was xe going on about?
"Are you saying that the people who died were just irresponsible? That it was their fault? If the proper safety protocols were in place, none of this would have happened." This was maybe a bit of a stretch, the ReMineDust policies were a bit lax. That didn't matter right now though.
"It's negligence, they're contributing to their own—" Julius began, now trying to make actual real eye contact with me again, but I cut xem off and continued looking at a place to the right of xir head.
"You are supposed to be the person in charge here. After the first death, you should've investigated why the crates were secured so poorly, stacked so badly, and so high. After the third, you should have looked into why the hauler bots were losing balance and flipping. After the eighth, you should have figured out why the collision detection, one of the most basic and high priority programs for a hauler bot, was so broken that someone got fully impaled by its tines and killed."
Threat assessment did not love the way Julius unfurled xir fingers from xir arms, sharply relocated xir hands to the edge of the table, and resumed xir death grip on a new surface. "You're here for loss prevention. It's not called death prevention. ReMineDust doesn't care about death prevention. You care about loss prevention. I'm doing exactly what you want! I'm putting productivity first, and it's working! We've finally caught up on all our vendor's orders, with nothing backlogged. For the first time in years, our stock is above KraftedOre's!"
Julius was continuing to valiantly try to make direct eye contact with me. Unfortunately, I think I needed to return it for this part. I deliberately looked back at xem. "If you tell me what actually happened, I can help you fix it."
As I looked into xir eyes (this was awful), I started to see moisture collect. Julius was completely frozen, and resisted blinking for several seconds. Xe started to shake, and due to how tightly xe remained stuck to the desk, it did too. "I don't think you can," xe said bitterly, breaking eye contact (thank fuck).
I was about to dig further, when an Assistance Needed, Priority: Extreme alert yanked my conversation with Three out of its backburnered position, and actually made me physically flinch. Stupid fucking human movement code. Julius flinched harder, letting go of the table and bringing xir arms up to xir chest.
Three's message had an attached location at the other side of the facility, near where I saw it earlier. Julius was saying something, but I didn't care. As I pushed myself away from the table and sprinted out of xir office, I sent back Acknowledged.