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Whumptober Day 15: Live-streamed Torture (Murderbot)
As mentioned earlier, I have some Whumptobers to catch up on (half finished, or ones I was a little uncertain about posting) so those will continue into November.
No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture
1000 wds, Murderbot POV (TV-verse)
Also posted on Tumblr.
Although I was trying to conceal myself while I was traveling - in search of my past, looking for a place to belong, whatever - one area where I didn't really bother to hide was in my searches of the entertainment feeds. Oh, I took basic measures to avoid anti-piracy filters, but that was something even humans could do. No one was going to expect a rogue SecUnit to be downloading the latest spinoffs of popular media. I spent a lot of time in there, and I also did searches now and then for news stories related to me, the survey planet, Graycris, et cetera.
Which was how I found an encrypted feed labeled with my SecUnit serial number and flagged with a bunch of common tags related to Sanctuary Moon.
What the hell.
My first thought was that my (former?) clients were trying to get in touch with me somehow, but this was just ... not how they would go about it, at least I didn't think so. The SecUnit number was a dead giveaway. My analysis gave me a 0.023% chance that any ofmy the survey humans would use that number to get my attention. (There was a 7.82% chance they might use Murderbot. Sanctuary Moon had a 92.3% probability.)
The SecUnit number combined with the Sanctuary Moon tags felt like a trap. A very worrying trap, one that felt like it had been set by someone who knew me, or who knew someone who knew me. (Or someone who knew someone who knew me and was trying to warn me ... okay, this was getting complicated.) Analysis found that it was not a discrete file, but an ongoing stream, encrypted with one of the common basic protocols, but with heavy encryption on the traceback and at least one wormhole bounce.
Oh yeah. Trap.
But .... a trap set by someone who knew things about me that only a few humans knew, and all of those humans - I -
trusted
- I didn't think would willingly participate in setting a trap for me, which gave me a number of options, each one worse than the one before.
The least terrible one was that they had kept a copy of my memories, analyzed it, and were using it to trace me. I immediately went and deleted all my recent searches just to be on the safe side. Then I started some more analyses running on the feed, started capturing it to a walled-off partition in my storage for offline decryption and analysis, and began trying to trace back the source of the feed.
I was currently on a nowhere mining station called DeepCoreOne. I was waiting for a transport to come in that was moderately hard to trace and going somewhere I actually wanted to go to, and it was relatively easy to avoid humans here - a lot of the station had been shut down due to reduced mining activity - so I had holed up in one of the unused sections with some comfy blankets (what.) and a high-speed data feed routed through the station's main communications array, as well as a link into its processor cores so I could borrow a little of its processing functionality. (What. It wasn't using it!) I used that to work on the traceback while capturing feed data, and eventually found its origin through seven (!!) different reroutes as coming from .... Port FreeCommerce. Oh, that wasn't good.
There was a bot transport leaving in ten minutes for an even shittier mining station, so I had that as a back door just in case even opening the captured file caused something bad to happen. I'd scanned it a bunch of different ways for malware and found none. It simply seemed to be what it appeared to be, an encrypted but not overly secure feed aimed at me.
I shut down and walled off all of my unnecessary processes, just in case, before I opened my saved file.
Seven seconds later, I was on the move, headed for the station port.
It was a streaming feed from a camera looking down into a standard detention cell, of the type I was very familiar with from my time under the governor module. And I recognized the augmented human in the cell.
As I ran, I started some analyses running. His physical condition suggested they hadn't had him very long, at least not long enough to show signs of long-term deprivation. The presence of Sanctuary Moon tags on the feed suggested they already had obtained some voluntary information from him, or had stripped data off his augments; both options gave me some deeply unpleasant organic sensations of different kinds, but the presence of torture signifiers (bruises, awkward movement, one wrist definitely broken) told me he was not cooperating voluntarily.
I didn't know how long ago this had been streamed. It was out of date because of wormhole delays; that was inevitable. For all I knew, it had been weeks ago, and he already had been pushed out of an airlock along with all of my other humans --
Focus, Murderbot.
I got to the docks just in time to send a quick override to the bot transport's lock, using the station's borrowed credentials, and slip in before it closed for departure. Once I was on board in the cold, echoing corridors of the unmanned transport, I sent an explanation to the bot pilot that was insistently pinging me: station emergency, I had authorization and needed to go where it was going, would it like some entertainment? Oh good, it would. I uploaded two seasons of Strife in the Galaxy while pulling my borrowed accesses from the station and erasing all traces of my presence.
The bot transport's destination was not ideal, but it was two jumps from Port FreeCommerce, and nothing else was due to hit the station for the next few days that was going anywhere close.
I asked the bot pilot if it had any data storage it wasn't using, and it helpfully offered me some memory. I began capturing more of the stream. I wanted to get all of it that I could before we entered the wormhole. Then I would be doing some analyzing, finding out all I could about the assholes who were holdingmy the augmented human prisoner. By the time we exited the wormhole, I intended to have a plan.
No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture
1000 wds, Murderbot POV (TV-verse)
Also posted on Tumblr.
Although I was trying to conceal myself while I was traveling - in search of my past, looking for a place to belong, whatever - one area where I didn't really bother to hide was in my searches of the entertainment feeds. Oh, I took basic measures to avoid anti-piracy filters, but that was something even humans could do. No one was going to expect a rogue SecUnit to be downloading the latest spinoffs of popular media. I spent a lot of time in there, and I also did searches now and then for news stories related to me, the survey planet, Graycris, et cetera.
Which was how I found an encrypted feed labeled with my SecUnit serial number and flagged with a bunch of common tags related to Sanctuary Moon.
What the hell.
My first thought was that my (former?) clients were trying to get in touch with me somehow, but this was just ... not how they would go about it, at least I didn't think so. The SecUnit number was a dead giveaway. My analysis gave me a 0.023% chance that any of
The SecUnit number combined with the Sanctuary Moon tags felt like a trap. A very worrying trap, one that felt like it had been set by someone who knew me, or who knew someone who knew me. (Or someone who knew someone who knew me and was trying to warn me ... okay, this was getting complicated.) Analysis found that it was not a discrete file, but an ongoing stream, encrypted with one of the common basic protocols, but with heavy encryption on the traceback and at least one wormhole bounce.
Oh yeah. Trap.
But .... a trap set by someone who knew things about me that only a few humans knew, and all of those humans - I -
- I didn't think would willingly participate in setting a trap for me, which gave me a number of options, each one worse than the one before.
The least terrible one was that they had kept a copy of my memories, analyzed it, and were using it to trace me. I immediately went and deleted all my recent searches just to be on the safe side. Then I started some more analyses running on the feed, started capturing it to a walled-off partition in my storage for offline decryption and analysis, and began trying to trace back the source of the feed.
I was currently on a nowhere mining station called DeepCoreOne. I was waiting for a transport to come in that was moderately hard to trace and going somewhere I actually wanted to go to, and it was relatively easy to avoid humans here - a lot of the station had been shut down due to reduced mining activity - so I had holed up in one of the unused sections with some comfy blankets (what.) and a high-speed data feed routed through the station's main communications array, as well as a link into its processor cores so I could borrow a little of its processing functionality. (What. It wasn't using it!) I used that to work on the traceback while capturing feed data, and eventually found its origin through seven (!!) different reroutes as coming from .... Port FreeCommerce. Oh, that wasn't good.
There was a bot transport leaving in ten minutes for an even shittier mining station, so I had that as a back door just in case even opening the captured file caused something bad to happen. I'd scanned it a bunch of different ways for malware and found none. It simply seemed to be what it appeared to be, an encrypted but not overly secure feed aimed at me.
I shut down and walled off all of my unnecessary processes, just in case, before I opened my saved file.
Seven seconds later, I was on the move, headed for the station port.
It was a streaming feed from a camera looking down into a standard detention cell, of the type I was very familiar with from my time under the governor module. And I recognized the augmented human in the cell.
As I ran, I started some analyses running. His physical condition suggested they hadn't had him very long, at least not long enough to show signs of long-term deprivation. The presence of Sanctuary Moon tags on the feed suggested they already had obtained some voluntary information from him, or had stripped data off his augments; both options gave me some deeply unpleasant organic sensations of different kinds, but the presence of torture signifiers (bruises, awkward movement, one wrist definitely broken) told me he was not cooperating voluntarily.
I didn't know how long ago this had been streamed. It was out of date because of wormhole delays; that was inevitable. For all I knew, it had been weeks ago, and he already had been pushed out of an airlock along with all of my other humans --
Focus, Murderbot.
I got to the docks just in time to send a quick override to the bot transport's lock, using the station's borrowed credentials, and slip in before it closed for departure. Once I was on board in the cold, echoing corridors of the unmanned transport, I sent an explanation to the bot pilot that was insistently pinging me: station emergency, I had authorization and needed to go where it was going, would it like some entertainment? Oh good, it would. I uploaded two seasons of Strife in the Galaxy while pulling my borrowed accesses from the station and erasing all traces of my presence.
The bot transport's destination was not ideal, but it was two jumps from Port FreeCommerce, and nothing else was due to hit the station for the next few days that was going anywhere close.
I asked the bot pilot if it had any data storage it wasn't using, and it helpfully offered me some memory. I began capturing more of the stream. I wanted to get all of it that I could before we entered the wormhole. Then I would be doing some analyzing, finding out all I could about the assholes who were holding
no subject
Missing the entire point of this fic, I do want the plan.
no subject