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On a cold, grey day in the heart of the Corporation Rim's industrial district, Head Construct Technician Arlton conducted an experiment.
“SecUnit 009761, unseal your mask.”
The SecUnit complied.
Its cubicle had been brought up to Arlton's office; this would be the first time it had left the cubicle since the mess it had made of its last contract. Arlton took his time surveying it. Based on the report he'd pulled up on the feed, this SecUnit had taken heavy damage during its last contract, but in the ten days since returning, the cubicle had managed to patch it up perfectly. All things considered, this SecUnit looked very ordinary.
“SecUnit 009761, disable your governor module.”
The SecUnit’s eyes visibly widened, but Arlton watched as it accepted the order and did its best to follow it.
No response, for a second. Then its face twitched in pain.
It did it again. And again.
Logs trickled in through the feed, slowly at first but quickly becoming more frantic. Each one signalled another attempt on the SecUnit's part at hacking its governor module, and each time it was rewarded with a shock. Arlton watched idly as the punishment strength increased with each failed attempt.
He smiled. So far, so good.
Testing the parameters of the governor module like this wasn’t part of standard SecUnit calibration instructions, and for good reason. It was stupidly risky, and, considering the thousands of far simpler requests which had been curated over the years to test that a governor module was working, an unnecessary one. SecUnits were built to be intelligent, with better connections to the feed and various security interfaces than even the most modified augmented human. When given the proper permissions, they could hack. Theoretically, it was absolutely possible for a SecUnit to render its governor module obselete. In fact, after twenty-seven years at the company and several promotions, a not-insignificant portion of Arlton's job these days was simply making sure that could never happen.
Perhaps because of all the inhibitors built into its code, though, it was incredibly rare for a SecUnit to actually go rogue, and there would be no safe recourse for it if it did. (Practically every company which manufactured SecUnits had the same vested interest in making sure ordinary civilians saw ungoverned SecUnits as a threat, and they'd all spent a great deal of money over the years getting that message across via the media industry.) Arlton considered it a point of pride that no SecUnit owned by his company had ever managed to hack its governor module. Clearly, they were doing something right.
But if the governor module knew how to do one thing, it was to inflict pain, and there were very few punishments as head-splittingly painful as one triggered by an attack on its own existence. Even the fact that it was following orders (or, well, trying to) would not save the SecUnit from its wrath. All that would be going on in its head right now would be a never-ending stream of punishment for attempting to hack its governor module, interspersed only by more punishments as it failed to follow clearly-defined orders. Arlton didn’t envy it.
Still, Arlton was, he felt, justified in his experiment. This particular SecUnit had been returned from its most recent rental with several reports of worryingly divergent behaviour indicating that it had been thrashing against the constraints of its governor module. Most concerningly, at it had tried to resist an order that told it to leave some heavily damaged indentured humans behind when a mine collapsed. There would have been no way to save them without doing an equal, if not greater amount of damage to itself, and the cubicle costs to fix the SecUnit up afterwards would have been more than those humans were worth. As its handler had told it afterwards, the SecSystem knows what it's doing when it gives you these orders. It thinks so you don't have to. She'd attempted to administer the appropriate disciplinary corrections, but there was only so much she’d been able to do with the limited rental equipment that went with SecUnits to a contract. If nothing was done about its disobedience, she had concluded in her report, there was a real chance that it might try to hack its governor module next.
Arlton wanted it to know what it was getting into if it tried.
In the present, he watched as SecUnit 009761 writhed in pain, caught between the contradictory orders clashing over and over again in its brain. It had begun to vocalise, and Arlton wanted to command it to shut up, but more orders it couldn't follow would be a waste of breath. The shocks from the governor module had crept up to 55% - much higher and its neural tissue would require repairs in a cubicle. Arlton let the orders stand for another ten seconds and then rescinded them. He checked the feed logs; the whole thing had taken less than two minutes. For a SecUnit, whose processing speed meant that a few seconds could feel like an eternity, those two minutes must feel excruciating. It had continued trying to hack its governor module right up to the end, though. (Earlier, he'd told one of his colleagues what he planned to do, and they'd laughed in response and hypothesised that the SecUnit would eventually realise it was a pointless endeavour and just...stop trying. Privately, Arlton had hoped for the same.) Sure, it was boded well for future contracts that the SecUnit continued to follow orders even when it was faced with so much pain, but its desperation unnerved him.
He allowed it a further thirty seconds to stop twitching and return to SecUnit neutral, but it still looked...off, somehow. Its eyes darted around the room instead of staying in one place – at the wall, at his face, at his shoulder, at the wall again, at his face again – and it was tense. He’d properly managed to shake it up, it seemed. Hopefully it had learned its lesson, but an uneasy feeling in his gut told him it would be back.
He cleared his throat. “That’s what you can expect if you continue down this path,” he said. “I’ve got my eye on you, and so will all your handlers from here on out. I know your serial number, and if I find that on your next contract, you’ve failed to follow orders to the letter, without hesitation –” he snapped his fingers, and the SecUnit flinched “– the same thing will happen again. And again, and again, and again, until you get it. There is no escape. Your governor module can't be reasoned with, it can't be destroyed, and it'll never let you hack it. It exists to cause you pain. Got that?”
The SecUnit nodded. Good; there wasn’t even a second of hesitation.
“Now seal up your mask and get back in your cubicle. And count yourself lucky that I didn’t leave you a fried-out mess on my floor.”
As the SecUnit sealed up its mask again, Arlton caught a spark of something like anger twisting its face. That old, old fear of SecUnits from his early technician days churned up his throat again, but he dismissed it.
This unit was nothing to worry about.