That was … not what I was expecting. I’d assumed a malfunction of my governor module had caused the massacre the company euphemistically referred to as an “incident.” But had I really taken out nine other SecUnits, plus all the bots and any armed humans who might have tried to stop me? I didn’t like my chances. If the other SecUnits had experienced the same malfunction, it had to come from an outside source.

I saved the conversation to my own storage, checked the other systems for stray files but found nothing, and unhooked myself from the console.

The security ready room had been stripped to the bone. But there were other places I could check. I pushed away from the console.

As I went through the other door, I noticed the impact points in the wall opposite, the stains on the floor. Someone—something capable of taking a high degree of injury had made a last stand here, trying to defend the control center. Maybe not all the SecUnits had been affected.

In the corridor near the living quarters, I found the other ready room, the one for the ComfortUnits.

Inside were four shapes that were clearly cubicles, but smaller. Their doors stood open, the plastic beds inside empty. In the corner there was space for a recycler, but no weapons lockers, and the storage cabinets were all different.

I stood in the center of the room. The cubicles for the murderbots had been closed, not in use. Which meant none of the SecUnits had been damaged and all had been either out on patrol, on guard, or in the ready room, probably standing around pretending not to stare at each other. But the cubicles for the sexbots were open, which meant they had been inside when the emergency occurred and the power shut off. If the power is off, you can manually open a cubicle from the inside, but it won’t shut again.

It meant they had deployed during the “incident.”

I used the energy weapon in my arm again to power the first cubicle’s emergency data storage. I didn’t have anywhere near the energy needed to get the whole thing powered up, but the data storage box is for holding error and shutdown information if something goes wrong during a repair. (There are a lot of other things you can do with it if you’ve hacked your governor module, like use it to temporarily store your media so the human techs won’t find it.) SecSystem might have used it before its catastrophic failure.

It had been used. But by the ComfortUnits, to download their data during the incident.

It was patchy and hard to put together, until I realized the ComfortUnits had been communicating with each other.

I stood there for five hours and twenty-three minutes, putting the data fragments together.