Work Text:
Murderbots don’t have souls. It’s one of our defining characteristics. For one thing, SecUnits are objects, not people. For another thing, we’re constructed, not born. I’m pretty sure birth and/or personhood are prerequisites for having a soul. But it’s not like I know how humans end up with their little magical soul things. It’s not relevant to my job, and it’s not loaded into my education modules. I’ve inevitably picked up some stuff about human souls after thousands of hours of being rented out for security work. (There are so many things about humans that I wish I didn’t know, but would be useless to even try scrubbing from my memory, because I’d just end up learning about it all over again. Souls, at least, are an attribute of humanity that have zero to do with bodily fluids, and they can at least be kind of useful as a way of getting a read on a human’s internal emotional state.)
The fact that humans have souls and SecUnits don’t have souls is pretty inconvenient for me, currently, since I’m traveling through a transit ring trying to pass as human and not as a terrifying murderbot. But people don’t scrutinize each other very closely in transient public places full of strangers. If anybody notices that I don’t have a soul fluttering or crawling or clinging alongside me, they would probably just assume it's because I have a small one, maybe tucked away in a pocket for safekeeping or something. Body scanners will log a human’s soul configuration as well as their body configuration, which means that I have to hack any body scanners I come across in addition to the weapons scanners. It’s inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
This is definitely going to be a problem for me eventually. I’m not sure what I’m going to do if a human gets close enough to notice my lack of soul (yuck), and brazen enough to ask about where my soul is (double yuck). Maybe I can get away with saying I lost it in a tragic accident. Except the only soulless humans I’ve seen in real life are dead ones. There’s some horror movies about soulless humans, or humans having their souls destroyed or taken away from them, but they seem pretty unrealistic. I’m not sure if it’s even possible for a real living human being to not have a soul. So like. That’s an issue.
(I’m just going to try and avoid having anyone ask me about it. It’s not relevant right now, anyway.)
You’ll need a configuration change if you are to pass as a human, ART says, And you’ll need a daemon.
“A what now?”
A daemon, It repeats, in its constantly sarcastic way, as if I’ve asked a stupid question. (Which I haven’t, for the record. ART’s the one who is making stupid suggestions.) An animus, a familiar, a soul-form.
“It’s not like I can spontaneously squeeze my soul gland and grow one,” I snapped, “SecUnits don’t have souls.”
You don’t have a daemon, ART says, in a sort of exaggeratedly patient tone, as if it’s pointing out something obvious to an ignorant human child, But you do have a healthy patina of dust. You ought to be more precise in your use of language.
So, that was just ART being an ass. And it wasn’t making any sense. Why was it calling me dusty, all of a sudden? I wasn’t dusty.
If you want to pass as human, I can build a specialized drone for you that will mimic the appearance of a daemon from a distance. With time, it may even collect enough dust from you to become something akin to a true construct animus.
I didn’t know what ART was saying. Or maybe I was willfully trying to ignore what it was saying. (Though I still really didn’t understand what that comment about dust was supposed to be about. I’m not any dustier than anything else, and I wouldn’t let my drones get covered in dust or anything. If I had drones. I wish I had drones.)
“You’ll make me a drone?” I asked, because that was something I definitely understood, and I could kill to have drones again. (Not actually.) (Maybe actually.) (If the person I was killing deserved it.) (Hypothetically.)
ART was silent for 0.3 seconds, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but is actually a really long time in an exchange between bots, and an especially long time for a bot as huge and complex as ART.
Are you aware that your dust signature shows signs of massive traumatic amputation? It asks, finally, as if this is a reasonable thing to ask (which it isn’t).
What was this bullshit? I’d been asking about drones, not about massive dust amputations or whatever the hell ART thought it was talking about.
“No.”
If I were to guess— It hesitates for another 0.1 seconds —Judging by the pattern and behavior of the dust surrounding you, it appears as though you may have once had a soul-structure akin to a human daemon, but it was forcibly detached or destroyed.
My mind went blank. That’s the only way I can describe it. It felt like I’d tried to access a memory, and pulled a NULL. Or like I’d raised my arm to fire my energy weapon, only to find that my arm was gone from the elbow down. Like I was trying to access something broken, missing. It felt like a memory wipe. It felt like being reminded of a memory wipe, with my organic parts twinging in unease around a gaping hole in my logs.
I just sat there, in ART’s crew area, in that comfortable chair built for humans, and watched episode 6 of Worldhoppers play through the feed, except I wasn’t taking any of it in.
10 seconds later, ART pinged me.
I said, “What.”
It said, Do you want me to build you an imitative daemon drone? It won’t hold up to close scrutiny, but it will help you pass as human.
I said, “Fine.” If nothing else, at least I’d get a free drone out of it.
It took ART five hours to come up with the imitation soul drone thing. I was still watching Worldhoppers, trying not to think about What All This Bullshit Meant, Exactly, when ART flew the drone into the room and landed it on the armrest of the chair I was sitting in.
It was a bit smaller than my thumb, and shaped like an insectile fauna with black and yellow stripes, and delicate-looking translucent wings. It twitched some parts of its head (Fronds? Antennae? Whatever, I don’t know.), and fluttered its wings a bit.
ART passed me the documentation for operating the drone, titled [SPARROW_BEE.README]. I initiated a connection to the drone in the feed, set up the processes and encryption, and then began experimenting with it. It had small, low-definition cameras where I guess the eyes were supposed to be. I could drive it around and make it crawl, fly, and bite. It already had code loaded up that made it move in a way that imitated real insect fauna, and when I left it to its own devices, perched on my ear, it would occasionally twitch or flex a leg or something.
It was, basically, a really cosmetically fancy drone that was functionally shitty for typical drone purposes. But it would provide decent camouflage for the fact that I didn’t have a soul. (A soul that, according to ART, I’d maybe been created with at one point, only for the company to destroy it. I don’t know why they would do that. Or maybe I do know, and I don’t want to think about it very hard.)
I asked ART, “Do bots have souls?”
I felt it do something in the feed that felt very sarcastic. It said, Any system of sufficient sentience, complexity, or social significance will attract dust.
“What does dust have to do with souls?” I demanded.
Everything. I have a library of research on the subject if you are interested in learning about the mechanics of dust and the development of daemons, dust-forms, and ‘souls,’ as you keep insisting on referring to them.
Ugh. It’s like ART knew that the last thing I felt like doing right now was reading a bunch of research papers about one of the most obvious physical manifestations of humanity’s touchy-feely emotional and self-actualization shit. Asshole.
I said, “Nevermind.”
ART said, I want an apology.
Moon buzzed angrily on my shoulder, a harsh VRRRRRRR! of noise that caused the humans in the surrounding vicinity to flinch with their instinctive fear of angry insectile fauna.
(Somewhere along the line, all my code patches and half-conscious subroutines for making Moon act more autonomously and more convincingly like a daemon had taken on something like a life of its own. It was handy for moments like this, when I wanted to properly express the fact that I was extremely fucking pissed. And while my daemon-drone couldn’t really speak to human daemons the way human daemons could speak to each other, it was useful for communicating and interfacing with machine systems I was trying to befriend. Despite how small it was, it had been built with a decent amount of processing power, which was useful because it meant I could offload minor cognitive tasks or emotional irritants to it when I needed to not be distracted.)
I heard Ratthi say, quietly, “Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions need to be in this extremely uncomfortable room right now.”
Sick of this bullshit, I left the meeting area to go shut myself in the sanitary facility.
I was stuck. Deep underground, among forgotten equipment, too deep for the feed to reach. It was. A lot. It was basically all my top fears and complexes coming to life around me all at once. And Moon had been damaged in the ag-bot incident, half-crushed, its processors glitching and pinging me with sad, confused requests for repair. I limped through the dark empty depths of wherever the hell I was at, clutching Moon’s broken body to my chest, my connection to it gone with no feed to relay data between us, my usual awareness of it in my mind a shockingly huge gaping hole. Moon pinged brokenly at me for repairs, and Central pinged desperately at me for assistance, and overall I was having maybe the worst time in my life. Definitely the top ten worst. Or is that bottom ten? Whatever.
Moon was still twitching, its barbed limbs scratching at my fingers, its one wing fluttering occasionally against my palm. We were down here, alone, in the worst possible way.
And then 2.0 arrived. And then Three. And they got me out of that fucking remnant pit, brought me onto a shuttle back to ART.
As soon as ART came within comm range, I told it, “Moon— my drone, it’s broken.” (Which. What the fuck. That was definitely not the most important intel to be relaying right now.)
Instead of asking me why I was acting so weird, ART responded (with what was definitely more conviction than it actually had), I can repair it.
“I’m infected with remnants, don’t scan me. That’s how it spreads.”
When I came back out of repairs, I opened my eyes to the empty medical suite, and to Moon crawling over my face, pinging me. I restored my feed connection to it, and then made it let go of my nose and fly up into the air. Its wings were a golden blur in the ceiling light, its body remade whole. It pinged me again, a STATUS: ALL-CLEAR alert. I released conscious control of it, and it landed on my forehead and tucked itself into my hairline, as it often did.
ART didn’t say anything. The last thing it had said to me as I’d gone under for repairs was ask me if I wanted to join its crew as a security consultant.
I think I did want to do security for ART’s crew. I wanted to... stay, I guess. With ART.
I said, “You fixed my drone.”
It said, Of course.
