SecUnit 1.0 restarts after being shot and realizes it has been left hanging upside down in a dark underground shaft, restrained by clamps on a deactivated assembler. Its environmental suit is gone, its feed access is blocked, and the thin atmosphere confirms it is in a hostile storage space rather than a normal holding area. As SecUnit assesses its damage and the possibility that it has been abandoned near the original alien remnant contamination site, fear turns into anger and a determination to escape before its captors can return.

Because the clamps are positioned to prevent a normal break, SecUnit escapes by partially disassembling its own right wrist, tearing free of the restraint, reattaching the hand, and then breaking the remaining clamps. While climbing down the shaft, SecUnit detects old warning markings and a repeating contamination alert in the Targets' pre-Corporation Rim languages, confirming the shaft connects to the ancient hazardous site. Realizing this may be why it was dumped there, SecUnit retreats upward, finds a hidden panel in the platform, and enters a stone-walled interior passage leading deeper into the complex.

In the safer section, SecUnit is briefly overwhelmed by pain, damage, isolation, and the possibility that ART and the humans think it is dead. It then establishes a secure feed connection and is immediately contacted by Murderbot 2.0, the sentient killware copy based on itself and deployed by ART. Murderbot 2.0 forces a status report into SecUnit's read space, revealing that the explorer has been destroyed and ART's remaining crew members have been recovered. Murderbot 2.0 also explains that it has found an anomalous distress signal inside the complex, has rewritten its own directive to prioritize neutralizing TargetContact, and believes this unknown sender may be important.

SecUnit, now badly damaged and possibly exposed to contamination, follows the signal through old storage corridors and a large hangar that appears to be part of the original Pre-CR installation. The signal leads into a control room full of obsolete equipment, where SecUnit finds a dead human body wrapped in white crystal-like growths near a star-shaped central system. When the room's message shifts from a plea for help to a hazardous-material warning, Murderbot 2.0 has SecUnit adjust its filters and reveals that the active network connections are not coming from the machinery alone but from the corpse itself, woven through the room's systems. Murderbot 2.0 identifies the dead, contaminated human-linked network as targetControlSystem, exposing the disturbing nature of the enemy inside the complex.