Chapter 1
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter:
- canon-typical descriptions of violence
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
My current calculations told me I had under four minutes left before the loss of blood and fluids reached a critical level that would send me into forced shutdown. I would have needed roughly three minutes and a half of those to get ART’s human back where ART could reach them, under better conditions. Not like this, with my left leg frayed by the raiders’s oddly SecUnit-specific firearm, not while trying to drag a half-conscious Turi out of this shitty corridor alongside me. (Apparently we had walked right into one of the raiders’s planetary hide-outs down here. They used some camo tech that was hard for me to see through, and were very good at making the colony planet appear abandoned.) Even if I wasn’t going to shut down soon, the corridor was structurally unstable and was going to collapse at any moment. I had messed up, and it wasn’t only going to cost my own life but also that of one of ART’s crew.
Turi was trying to say something, but only wheezes came out between what must have been a punctured lung from a splintered rib, from the sound of it. Shit. Ever since my comms had cut out, the disturbing broken-human noises coming from them had been even more stressful than they usually would have been. At least the raiders didn’t seem to be following us anymore (I think they were dead - I wasn’t very certain, I left the last two of them incapacitated with a drone to watch over them, but with my comms the connection to the drones had fizzled and died just like my connection to ART. Yeah, it was bad.)
“Don’t talk,” I said to Turi, my own voice not much steadier than my gait, since energy preservation was cutting into my language modulation.
“We’re almost out.” I didn’t want one of ART’s humans to die afraid. They groaned, a wet and worrying sound. I locked my finger joints in place where I had them wrapped around their upper arm, hoping they wouldn’t feel that bit of additional pain, knowing that if I didn’t, my grip would falter. I was starting to lose feeling in my extremities from the blood loss. The raider’s firearm had disabled part of my automatic sealant system for wound closure. It made me angry, but I didn’t really have time to be angry. We had less than three minutes, now, and Turi was dragging behind. The ominous creaking of slowly caving metal structures sounded above us and echoed off my own anxiety.
Fuck. I could see the end of the tunnel, with lights ahead and everything, but with every passing second my visuals faded more and more. I thought I saw movement in the distance, but it might have been a flicker in the atmosphere from the heat that permeated on this shitty planet. I really didn’t want to die on a fucking planet , of all places.
Time passed by and ran away from me. I could almost taste the edge of the feed on the periphery of my senses. I might also have been hallucinating it, those things happened when my reliability dropped under 20% (it had been a slow descent, which was the only reason I was still conscious). It would be too late, no matter what. But I couldn’t stop, not with ART expecting its human back.
Just before my last sensors winked out, ART pinged me, and I had a brief thought about how nice that would be if it were real. Oh, the things we invent when we are scared and want to be rescued.
The ping lodged, and then pulled me forward, and I stumbled two more meters, unknowingly, and suddenly everything lit up around me. I can’t really reconstruct what happened next, since most of my systems were offline. They came back with a bone-rocking shudder that I didn’t cause. A familiar, enormous presence brushed me, and it wasn’t possible because I was still too far away.
Let me in , ART said, not needing to because I knew this process well enough. I was broken and barely movable, and ART’s human was dying under my hands. Whatever ART wanted to do, I would let it. Not much of the typical drowning sensation followed; I was too far gone for that. ART spread throughout my body and, I think, assessed the situation. I couldn’t move anymore on my own, but I walked on. ART was moving me and I was safe, feeling nothing. Even the terror and despair were being pushed aside by ART’s presence in my head. It nudged me to recalibrate my visual and aural sensors first, and with its help I could focus enough to do it. I saw again, and the path to safety was still too long, still impossible, and Turi was still breathing raggedly.
Don’t give up , ART’s voice in my head. I wouldn’t. I wanted to. No. I’m here to help you.
I didn’t have the bandwidth to sarcastically ask it how it was planning on doing that, and I didn’t have to. It just did. It first moved through my extremities, tweaking codes here and there to seal my leakages faster. The less fluid I lost the more likely I would continue to be functional. I was trying to follow, but the enormity of two minds in my damaged body caused an overheat. ART pushed me further back in my own head. I instead watched Turi, to make sure they were still there. ART kept my feet moving even though my own systems couldn’t. I was losing access to my motor function, and parts kept falling off from my damaged leg. I alerted ART of this, without words because I had none left, and it began coding orders to move my metal frame in case no muscle mass remained. From there, it stabilized as much of my organics as it could. I kept walking. Steadily. Numbly. Approaching the end of the tunnel. I didn’t even understand how ART had managed to reach me, let alone find a connection stable enough to jump into my head, but as we got closer to the surface its presence became ever stronger.
I also thought I heard someone shout for Turi. It would be nice if someone was shouting for Turi. They might make it, if someone got them to ART’s MedBay in time. I was still doubting it. ART wasn’t. One foot in front of the other. It puppeteered me, and as it did it handed me what little I could still process. Hold this . I held the codes to my slowly sealing leakages. Hold this . I held the calibration specs for my inputs. Stabilizing myself, under ART’s instructions, and holding on to my client.
Somehow, we reached the end of the corridor. Light, more shouting, ART’s broader feed presence, ART’s humans. My systems barely online. Mission objective accomplished. Relief.
Someone tried to pull my client away from me. I held on tight.
Let go. Our humans are safe . ART enveloping my consciousness completely, safely. My hands relaxed, or ART relaxed my hands for me. Turi was wrenched out of my grip. I let go.
And shut down.
That’s not what I meant, you great idiot.
I felt my face twist. ART was all over my feed, as if making sure all of me was there. As it noticed my waking up, it receded slowly.
Wait, I sent without actively planning to. I wasn’t even sure ART would hear me. Don’t leave.
I won’t. You’re leaking on my deck. Matteo is trying to get you to my medical suite but you are making it very difficult. ART sounded strange. I wanted to know why but I didn’t really have the capacity to figure it out right now.
I can’t move, I pointed out. I didn’t even know where my body was in relation to myself. Or where I was, besides on ART’s deck. I didn’t even fucking feel Matteo trying to get me somewhere. Something was genuinely wrong with my sensors.
You don’t have to move. You have to let Matteo move you onto one of my gurneys, that’s all. That sounded nice. Wait a minute.
Where is Turi?
ART sent me an onslaught of data from its medical area, mapping out Turi’s current status as critical but stabilizing. In addition it sent status updates on every other crew member that had gone to the planet with us. All of them were alive, some in better shape than others, but none as bad as Turi. Good job, Murderbot. I acknowledged the data, too exhausted to comment.
Then something tugged my arm, registering only dimly. That’s Matteo, ART assured me, and I stopped instinctively freezing. Just let them help you. They need to check for contamination. I attempted to transmit an image from one of my drones of how the raider’s gun had glowed with something strangely alien, but couldn’t manage to access that part of my storage. I got lost for a moment, then movement registered. Some of my external sensors returned, telling me gravity was pulling at my back. ART said, you’re on a gurney now. I have to secure you, don’t startle. I flinched anyway when I felt a safety fastening lock around my wrists and ankles.
Sanctuary Moon ’s main theme started playing in the back of my head, and ART was there, not looming, just watching. I stopped clinging to my sensors, it took so much energy.
Suddenly, ART almost yelled into the feed, No. Stay awake. It sounded so strange again, strangled, as if a bot of any size could sound like that.
SecUnits don’t sleep, I replied. The soundtrack stopped and switched to irregular static noise, meaningless and uncomfortable. Ouch. Stop that, ART.
You’ve suffered critical damage to multiple organic areas of your neural tissue and you must remain conscious to guarantee functionality of your self-repairing processes until you are in my MedBay.
Oh. I tried to extend my awareness into my nerves and found I barely could. That’s kinda bad isn’t it. The staticky pattern changed into something even less predictable, and I suddenly registered something - cold, smooth - under my left hand. I flexed my fingers and found it to be round.
That’s one of my drones. Hold on to it, and don’t let go.
I squeezed the drone. ART’s presence in the tatters that remained of my feed seemed to swell at that, bordering on overwhelming, just enough to keep me from sinking into the feeling of-
Safety?
I lost some time while clutching the frayed ends of my awareness together in my palm. When the gurney drone heaved my body onto the medical suite’s platform (I believe it was the drone, Matteo would never be able to lift me like that), I noted that the small drone in my hand had turned warm. ART blanketed my senses in the familiar way that felt like my head was under water for a few milliseconds, and then its MedSystem initiated scan and repairs. I tried to stay conscious as best as I could, remembering that that helped the repair processes. It was kind of okay, actually. The drone under my palm issued arrhythmic vibrations every other second, not painful but irregular and unusual enough for me to focus on. ART’s presence in the feed distracted me from the unpleasant feeling of being repaired without actually being able to tell what was happening. Maybe there had been some kind of neurotoxin in that weapon blast that caused this. I should have stolen one of those.
Things returned to me slowly. ART informed me about developments in a neutral voice, but it sounded less strained with every bit of my systems that it restored. I wasn’t worried, really. Our humans were safe, and sure I had fucked up, but ART wouldn’t. Not with that much of its processing capacity focused on me. Why did it do that, I wondered while watching my performance climb back into the lower 40s, didn’t it have humans to care for? Its attention was getting more and more overwhelming the more I became aware of myself again.
Once I had the capacity to multitask, I queried an episode of the latest season of Timestream Defenders Orion . ART accepted, but I dimly noticed that the episode was shorter than usual.
Did you cut out the fight scene at the end?
Yes. I’m not in the mood for further violence aimed at people I care for. The drone made a chirping noise and sent a distress signal. I glanced at it, with my partially restored visual inputs, and noticed the small dent I had pushed into its side.
It’s just fiction, ART. No reply. I think I squished your drone.
I’ll make a more durable one. It started the episode without further comment. I didn’t mind the missing action scene, if I was honest. I felt pretty tired of all the stress as well. Halfway through the third episode (ART just continued playing them, and I had nothing to complain about), I was able to pick up most of my surroundings again, and regained access to the swarm of drones that had survived the hostile interactions on the planet. We had left the planet, by then, in a rather hurried undocking maneuver I hadn’t even noticed.
Iris had been sitting beside the medical suite for the past hour and a half, apparently. She smiled at me through one of the drones, once it picked up flight again, but didn’t say anything. Eventually, I was able to roll back what inputs I had missed while my systems were critical - good old company protocol had me recording my surroundings even when I couldn’t pay attention to them, and caught the following conversation half an hour after Iris took a seat beside me.
Seth, through the hatch that opened for him as he approached, asked, “Is everything alright in there?”
“Peri says it’s going to be okay.”
“And it will be. How are you holding up? You know this isn’t on you, right?”
Iris sighed. “No Dad, I know. I just wish… well, I’ll do better next time. I tried my best, but sometimes best isn’t enough, you know? Look at SecUnit. I don’t think I’ve seen it this bad before.”
Seth hummed something, the sound of footsteps followed by soft rustling. “Don’t worry about it. Perihelion is taking care of SecUnit, just like it takes care of us. You should get some rest.”
“Rest,” Iris echoed, “I’ll do that when SecUnit wakes up again.”
More rustling, and an exchanged whisper of love-affirmations between the two humans, then the door shut again behind Seth. Into the silence left behind, Iris said, “Yes, Peri, I know, but maybe you need a little bit of support right now, too. I’m not leaving you either.”
A slight spike of something waved through the feed from ART. Get out of my head , I said, but didn’t mean it. ART pinged me, mockingly.
I stayed a bit longer in medical than necessary, after repairs were done, and tried to get the drone back into not-squished shape.
Iris followed my attempts with her eyes, not saying anything but yawning a lot. My fixing skills weren’t as dependent on my mental state as I hoped they’d be, but tinkering around with the drone kept me from thinking about the whole debacle that had just happened.
Iris yawned again.
“Go to sleep, Iris,” I told her. “I’ll be fine.”
She gave me a dubious look, and then her jaw moved as she said something to ART that wasn’t meant for me to hear. Whatever ART replied, she believed it enough to give in. She got up, stretched, winced from the strain that probably caused her, considering that she must have been at least a bit sore still from all that running and shouting and dragging people from A to B. Seven minutes after she left, ART informed me that she had indeed found her way to her quarters.
I pinged it in acknowledgement, and focused back on the drone. I eventually realized that I’d need proper tools, and more time, so I pocketed the drone with the promise to ART to just do that later.
In the hallway outside medical, Martyn was leaning against a wall and scrolling through the feed in the way humans do when they pretend to be busy and not suspicious at all. “Ah, SecUnit,” he said, as if he was surprised to see me. ( Your humans are being weird , I told ART, and ART did the feed equivalent of an amused chuckle.) “I’m glad to see you out and about again.”
I was out and about to go back to my private area, exactly because I didn’t like this kind of human smalltalk. I didn’t stop walking, just nodded and slowed down a little, and made my way past him.
“You really scared us.” That made me stop walking. He didn’t say it, but he implied ‘scared for ’ not ‘scared by’ you with his tone of voice, and that did something funny to my organic parts. I wondered if I should apologize.
Instead I said, “How’s Turi?”
I knew how Turi was, ART had kept me updated on the recovery of all of them.
“Turi is fine. But you were both in pretty bad shape.” Martyn inhaled, and moved to face me more than before, not that I was facing him. ART’s bulkhead was very interesting to look at. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Huh. “For what?” If anything, I had to be sorry.
“For sending you into this situation without better recon. You warned us that something didn’t seem right with the colony, and you were right.”
My thinking processes did an annoying thing that felt like they were freezing and turning in circles at the same time. It was nice to see humans admit that they’d made mistakes, but hearing it directly was still strange, even after many, many months of working with them. “I will take your advice more seriously in the future, as I should have done already.”
He sounded so painfully earnest. I really had to go. Earnesty is a lethal device against murderbots, didn’t he know? I took a step away from him, and he didn’t even make a move to hold on to me. ART’s humans were almost as good as my own.
“Oh, and SecUnit?” I stopped, again, squeezing my eyes shut as if that would protect me. “Thank you for getting Turi out safely, and for coming back in one piece… well, mostly one piece.”
ART leaned into my feed a bit, and I managed to reply, “No problem,” before hurrying down the hallway as fast as possible without running.
Martyn is correct , ART said, once I was back in my own quarters and trying to have a private emotion in private. Thank you for providing my crew with excellent protection.
I really could have argued against that - there was nothing excellent about almost dead humans - but ART didn’t let me, and started an episode in the feed.
Notes:
I made this meme for this chapter specifically, but I feel like its really just a Murderbot mood.
ID: A two panel image from the TV show Community. The first panel shows a woman with Murderbot's head from the cover of Fugitive Telemetry superimposed over the face. The yellow text reads "I can excuse nearly dying, but I draw the line at being concerned for my well-being". The second panel has another person labeled "ART & CREW" in white text. The yellow text at the bottom says "You can excuse nearly dying?!" /End ID
Chapter Text
And then the astronomy major replied: “One heck of a big apartment,” ART finished.
Seth chuckled and Iris outright laughed. Yeah, there was definitely a joke I was missing here.
When I had joined the crew in the media lounge for the premier of the new Sanctuary Moon movie, I knew it was because they had wanted me to spend time with them. I had been disinclined to join them, at first, but ART had convinced me to at least try (it had promised new drones with little lasers on them. Bribery, perhaps, but who was I to say no to armed drones?)
So I had watched the movie (it was a poor revival attempt, but, frankly, I was so starved for new Sanctuary Moon content since the show had been cancelled two corporate standard years ago that I didn’t even care that there were plot holes large enough ART could fly through them.)
That had been over an hour ago. I wasn’t sure why I was still here, but I was.
My knees were drawn close to my chest in my favorite chair in the media lounge, and I was watching the crew through my drones and ART’s cameras, idling about. They had just been chatting for this entire hour, despite the rest period having started over an hour ago.
And I was still here.
Did you get the joke? ART asked me in our private feed.
Not even a little bit.
I could explain it.
Isn’t it not funny, then?
Maybe, but then at least you would understand it.
I watched Iris and Matteo as they threw puffed up vegetable kernels at each other. They were laughing. Seth and Martyn were quietly talking and Turi had fallen asleep on top of Kaede, who was also sleeping and leaking from the corner of her mouth. Karim and Tarik had left shortly after the movie had ended, yawning and complaining about a lack of sleep. They had left at separate times, but I had seen them both enter Karim’s room (I had been about 83% sure and rising that they were a couple, and that just confirmed it. I really hoped it wouldn’t result in some messy drama I would be forced to stop.)
Sure. Explain your joke.
I could feel ART was surprised, but not enough that it didn’t send me a data packet 1.2 seconds later.
I opened it, skimmed it, then closed it.
I’m not trying to read all that. I said explain it, not make me take a class.
I compiled that data myself, so it’s as good as me explaining it.
I rolled my eyes. You know what I meant.
Fine, but just because you clearly need the hand holding.
And ART began to explain the joke. It was about a human scientist working on a planet in an old-fashioned campus-housing setting, and a miscommunication with a student. There was scientific context that ART explained to me, and historical context that it forgot to explain because it assumed I knew. I still didn’t find it very funny, but I think I understood why the humans had laughed about it. Sometimes jokes were bad on purpose, and if anyone was asshole enough to tell eye-roll inducing jokes on behalf of its crew’s sanity, it was ART.
- .... . .--- --- -.- . .-- .- ... -. - ..-. ..- -. -. -.--
Explaining the joke eventually transformed into ART talking more about its function (the deep space research, not the illegally liberating abandoned colonies one).
It talked for hours.
I had no desire to stop it.
Our private feed connection was absolutely bursting with information and the pictures and data it often sent me to illustrate its point. It seemed it had been just waiting for the opportunity to tell me this; waiting for me to ask.
Am I getting annoying? It asked eventually, maybe because I hadn’t prompted anything in a while.
“Always, but not about this,” I said, fiddling with my new drones on my workbench in the armory (it was basically a closet, and only one small table fit in here. I had requisitioned over 50% of the gear the crew now stored in here. For illegal colony liberators who dealt with corporates on the regular, ART’s humans were far too optimistic about their chances in a firefight.)
Are you, it hesitated for 0.1 seconds, barely a pause for anyone who wasn’t me, interested in the topic?
I thought about that. Was I?
I re-skimmed the most recent data ART had sent me. It was a little interesting, in that way something really cool that you didn’t understand at all was interesting, but I had no desire to truly learn about the subject in any significant way.
“Not really,” I said, and I could almost feel ART frown in the feed.
I can stop.
“You don’t have to.”
You’re not enjoying yourself.
“I never said that.”
So you are enjoying yourself?
I thought about that, too. Huh. I guess I was.
“Yes, I am.” I was still working on my drone, but I had stopped doing any real maintenance. I was just pulling it apart and putting it back together again.
I’m not sure I understand.
I shrugged. Me neither.
“You can keep talking about it. I would tell you if I didn’t want to hear about it anymore,” I said, and I snapped the casing of my drone back together. I sent it a code and watched it fly around the room, checking its inputs as it went.
ART didn’t resume its explanation into deep space star mapping. In fact, it said nothing at all. Which was weird, and I didn’t like it.
“What’s wrong?”
I’m not sure. It’s weird now.
“How is it weird? You’re telling me about the thing you like doing. Just because I’m not interested in the subject doesn’t mean I’m bothered by you talking about it.” There was a stutter in the drone’s flight path, so I recalled it to my hand and started pulling it apart again.
You want me to talk about it. This was a statement, not a question, but I answered it anyway.
I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
Well, if you insist…
ART talked about star mapping for another three hours.
..-. .-. .. . -. -.. ... .-.. .. ... - . -. - --- ..-. .-. .. . -. -.. ... .. -. ..-. --- -.. ..- -- .--.
Sometime after that, during a cargo mission, I was sitting in my favorite chair in the media lounge, watching Advantage with ART, a serial we were both very excited about, as it managed the cargo being loaded. We were at a Corporation Rim station, which meant I had no reason or desire to disembark. My official capacity on this trip was to prevent unwanted boarding by raiders or anything along those lines, not that ART really needed my help with that. The unofficial/real reason for my presence on this mission was to prevent ART from going crazy with boredom. Uncrewed cargo missions were not exactly one of its favorites.
I understood why.
“How did you do this before me?”
Begrudgingly, and with some prejudice. It also remains incredibly boring.
“Hurtful. It’s not my fault your brain is too big.”
My brain is exactly the correct size it’s meant to be, yours is just very small.
“If I had a hard currency card for everytime you insulted the size of my processors-,”
You could buy yourself more processors.
“Asshole . ”
The lights directly within my eyeline flickered, as ART did the feed equivalent of laughing.
We watched another episode of Advantage , but I didn't start another one, as we were undocking from the station soon. We fell into one of those silences that seemed to have become the norm since I joined ART's crew. It was strange, knowing that we didn't need to say or do anything. I could just sit here. I thought that was only something humans did, like my Preservation humans.
I watched the final cargo module be attached to ART, and the undocking data was sent through the feed. It wasn't until ART had fully disengaged from the lock that I relaxed from the position I had put myself in; I had squeezed my knees tightly to my chest, and my breath had become even more shallow than normal. ART put an episode of Sanctuary Moon in the queue, and its presence helped me put my feet firmly on the floor.
You know, you could try them, if you wanted to.
"Try what?"
My processors.
"What?"
I could let you enter my processors via the feed.
" What? " I wasn't even sure where to begin with that. Me? In ART'S processors?
What part of that is difficult to comprehend?
"All of it? You want me to do what? Why?"
Why not? You might find it interesting.
I remembered when I fused myself with the company gunship (subjectively, that felt like centuries ago, but it had technically been only a little over five corporate standard years.) I had wiped my own memory, nearly permanently. I wasn’t interested in repeating the process. It hadn’t exactly been pleasant.
It wouldn’t be like that.
I was so startled by ART’s words I squinted at the nearest camera.
No, I’m not in your thoughts, even though I could be.
“Then how did you know what I was thinking about?”
You only have one experience of inhabiting a ship body, unless there’s something I don’t know about you. Not that I have to know everything.
It was a fair point. There was very little about me that ART didn’t know. With all the time we had spent together in the last four years (not all of it had been with ART; I still visited Preservation at least twice a year, sometimes more, when I felt like it) I had told it basically everything about myself. At least the parts of myself after I had hacked my governor module.
I had even told it about Miki, more recently.
(I had expected pity and “I am sorry for your loss” (it wasn’t even my loss) or something else unhelpful and meaningless. ART had been silent for a while after I had explained, and then it just said, I think I would have liked to have met it.
“Why?”
I need to know more bots who have excellent taste in companionship. There are so few as refined as I.
I had snorted, queued up some media , and that had been that.)
I rolled my eyes.
“No, that was the only time,” I said.
Yes, and it was under less than ideal circumstances with a simple bot pilot.
When ART said simple, it sometimes meant incompetent. This was one of those times.
“You’re a thousand times larger than a gunship bot pilot-”
You can’t really quantify it but I am much larger than a thousand times-
“-which already nearly borked my brain permanently, and I’m not really interested in reliving that experience,” I finished.
I felt ART bristle up in the feed.
I am not a simple bot pilot.
Oh, I think I had upset it a little. Whoops.
“I wasn’t trying to say you were, ART-”
You would never sustain such damage in my systems. I wouldn’t allow it.
Oh. Oh that had been what upset it. Whoops, again.
It was heavy in the feed, now, doing the equivalent of staring me down, and I knew I had pissed it off a little more than previously anticipated. I resisted the urge to fidget. It backed off after a second of this.
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get so upset.
Yeah, I figured as much.
“I wasn’t trying to imply you would hurt me, ART.” I wanted to say something else, because I knew ART had a lot of emotions about potentially hurting its crew. It was particularly fierce about this ever since the alien contamination incident. (The year after that had been interesting .)
I know you weren’t.
The silence was less comfortable this time, and a little awkward. I didn’t even want to restart the conversation, but I could tell ART still needed something from me. I skipped over the episode of Advantage we were on to the episode of Sanctuary Moon that ART had queued, and pinged it in offering. It hit play and we began watching it.
After it was over, I began another episode, and I figured I was going to have to be the one to break the silence.
“I know you wouldn’t hurt me, I know that, logically.” I didn’t know how to finish what I had planned to say.
It was a traumatic experience for you.
I rolled my eyes and nodded. It seemed my whole life was a traumatic experience, according to ART.
“So I’m not sure if I want to do that again,” I finished.
I understand.
“But you’re disappointed.” I could tell. It had drawn back in the feed, and considering it liked to be a huge, annoying presence all the time, I knew that meant it was feeling something negative and was trying not to show it.
I am, a little. I wanted to, no, I want for you to experience such a thing under better circumstances. To return the favor.
That got me. I had no idea what it meant by that. Return the favor? What favor? I hadn’t ever really done it any favors; at least not recently, and it always paid me back when I did. (Usually in drone upgrades. My drones were very cool, now, and probably illegal in a lot of non-corporate systems. I knew for a fact some of the laser and ultrasonic enhancements they had now were definitely illegal on Preservation, not that Station Security would ever know about them.)
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
It didn’t respond immediately, and I knew this pause was because it probably thought I had just asked a really dumb question.
I am constantly riding your feed to take in data on your environment as well as the media we watch.
“Yeah, so?” I would do that no matter what. “That’s not a favor, that’s just being friends.”
I wasn’t fully convinced that I was very good at the whole friendship thing, sometimes, but I knew friends didn’t take away important resources from other friends, even if they weren’t fully necessary.
(It was a bit like when we were fighting Senior Officer Indah about my presence on Preservation Station, and Dr. Mensah explained my drones to be medical devices. I was kind of like that for ART, for sensory and emotional contextual data. Not quite to 'fully interact with surroundings,' as Mensah had put it, but similar.)
Regardless, it’s an invaluable service you provide for me. I want to return the favor and give you an opportunity to try a form that isn’t your own, in a way that won’t harm you. Only if you want to, of course. (I noticed three full seconds later that I had called ART my friend, and that it had not commented on it at all, not even sarcastically.)
I opened my mouth to object, but didn’t say anything. The idea sounded interesting.
“So, what would this entail, exactly?”
I could feel ART’s attention in the feed increase as it barely managed to contain its excitement.
I could show you some of my core systems. You would be fully immersed, but could return to your body at any time. I would of course ensure that a connection remains for that purpose. I would like for you to experience star mapping as I have described it before. You mentioned, when you shared space with the gunship bot pilot, that you could feel the ship’s body. I want you to have that opportunity with me, because I think it will be different in a pleasant way. Also a less stressful environment means you might actually get to enjoy the experience.
ART stopped abruptly, and went silent. I almost asked why it did that, and decided it was probably better for everyone if I didn't. It sounded a lot like a guided tour, like when new students boarded ART (I didn't always stay for the school semesters, but I had done it a few times at this point) and received a tour of its interior. It would be like that, but more. I would get to see ART in a way I had a feeling very few people had or ever would. Humans would only ever see data readouts of this information; I would get to experience it first hand.
I couldn't speak, suddenly, overwhelmed with the idea.
ART had gone quiet, and was waiting for me to respond. I wasn’t sure what to say.
Except, maybe I did want to try this.
“Ok, but not until we’re in the wormhole and on our way out of corporate space.” I used to have such patience for corporate bullshit, but it had been waning for years, and at this point there wasn’t really any left.
ART sent an affirmative and pulled up another episode of Sanctuary Moon. We watched through it and then some more episodes of Advantage as ART made its way to the wormhole.
When we were in it for an hour, ART pinged me.
I kicked my legs up over the side of the seat I was in, and a thought occurred to me.
“This won’t mess with your navigation, will it?”
ART did the feed equivalent of scoffing. Please, have some faith.
I rolled my eyes and set my head back against the cushions of the chair.
It wasn’t like with the company gunship. I had slipped into the ship, right into the bot pilot’s hardware, and we had practically been the same entity.
With this, ART opened a path in its firewalls, and pulled me in when I fully entered the feed.
I didn’t have a sudden jolt where ART’s body became mine, I could tell ART was holding back, but the feed was gone completely and now everything was pure data.
I could still feel ART heavy next to me. Or part of me? It sometimes felt next to me and sometimes we overlapped as it pulled me around.
ART’s processors were too big for me to spread out completely, which is why it took what felt like an eternity but must have only been a fraction of a second for me to finally feel a hard vacuum on the metal hull. Except we were in a wormhole, and this was ART’s hull, and nothing was the same.
I took in the data, filtered by ART (I had a feeling the raw data intake from the gunship bot pilot had been a contributing factor to my brain melting, so I couldn’t experience it completely, but that was fine by me.)
But it was already so much more. I could feel the reality bending effects of the wormhole glide over ART’s- my- our body. It felt like it should tear us apart, but the data I was taking in explained how it wouldn’t, how it couldn’t, and, as I took in frequency data that explained how it worked, I stared at the wafting color streams, mesmerized, until ART gently pulled me away from that processor.
It showed me the star mapping equipment next, and I took in every equation at once as all the data unfurled around me. Stars sprawled as far as I could process, and the anatomy of the stars made such clean, clear, solid forms - it all made perfect sense, suddenly, and it was intoxicating in a way I had never thought I could feel. I recognized the data had been formed and reformed into interesting shapes, and it felt like boredom , boredom that cut me through like a form of torture I had never experienced and the only word that came to mind was choking, it felt like choking-
ART took me away from that, then, and I was gliding along pathways that could only be described as neural and I was expanding as far as my processing would allow and, unlike the gunship, I couldn't touch ART’s horizon by overextending myself to the very ends of those pathways. ART carefully curbed my stretching before I went too far.
We communicated even faster than I had communicated with anyone before, and ART asked if I wanted to see its crew files. I said sure.
It pulled data up on Iris, first. There were mostly hard words here, which almost felt harsh in this environment.
Iris:Sibling::Caretaker:Perihelion
Seth:Parent::Caretaker:Perihelion
Martyn:Parent::Caretaker:Perihelion
=Family:Affection ^ [Variable]
It kept going, pulling up the data it had on its crew, mostly raw, factual information. Here and there were variables I didn’t recognize at first, then abruptly realized were remade versions of my own data. This is where ART used the emotional context I provided it to apply feelings to its crew. There was no space to dwell on anything here, so I could only set it aside for later. Another of the “is to” charts came up. This one started with my hard feed address.
[Variable]:SecUnit::MutualAdministrativeAssistant/Friend:[variable_safety]
[Variable]:SecUnit::Murderbot:[variable_affection]
What?
There were more charts, more data, and I was starved for it; the inside of ART was as much a hungry void as the hard vacuum outside.
We passed by something magnetic, bright and burning, and I reached out and nearly got pulled in by it, drawn to it, and ART pushed me away quickly. This was its central core, it explained, the section of its systems dedicated to its kernel. The heart and brain within the body, it unnecessarily supplied. It was nuclear, just like mine, but bigger. ART could not filter the data stored there, and it wasn’t sure if it would hurt me or not.
I reached for it until we were in a system far enough removed I no longer felt the intensity of its pull; but I could still sense it, at the end of every pathway and connection; all roads lead back to it.
I saw navigation and for a moment that felt like an eternity I was piloting the body. It wasn’t hard, with the coordinates laid out there, all the data available in less than an instant. I felt the engines, and I could see the end of the wormhole, far away but close at the same time. All of the information slotted together perfectly, seamlessly, and piloting was a lot like breathing; effortless, natural. It took almost nothing from me.
ART guided me to its internal sensors and cameras, functions with which I was already familiar, but not through this lens.
Visual data was much the same, with an overlay of additional information like where small dirt particles where, things out of place, and highlighted points of interest.
I could see my body, lying sideways on the chair in a way annotated as illogical .
The entirety of my body was a highlighted point of interest, and when I tapped it, the personnel file came back up.
[Variable]:SecUnit::Murderbot:[variable_affection]
I tapped again.
[variable_affection]
I closed the expanded definition quickly, which was quite fast, considering the speed at which I was handling things right now.
I explained to ART that I would like to return to my body. It seemed disappointed I didn’t want to stay for longer, but not so much that it didn’t understand. It was unable to fully filter its emotions here, and ART was pleased, happy, excited, and something else. I could read the data of the emotions.
[variable_affection]
I slipped out through the feed, and back into my body.
It took a full minute for me to reorient my systems.
Mental faculties intact? ART asked immediately, doing the feed equivalent of chuckling.
I felt completely enveloped by its feed presence, and it was heavy enough I felt like I was wearing a thick blanket.
It was terrifying.
ART pinged me for attention, and I checked my internal clock. It had been five minutes since I returned to my body.
I’m fine, I responded, and I felt its attention sharpen.
Are you sure?
I’m sure.
ART pulled a diagnostic report from my system, which felt a little rude, but ok.
Ok.
So. That had just happened.
The first real thought I had about the experience was a memory, the one when, a subjective eternity ago, ART had asked, no, stated, that I didn’t like my function. Something it couldn’t understand because its function was great.
On second review, “great” wasn’t a strong enough descriptor anymore.
ART’s function was amazing.
I checked my clock, and I had been in ART’s processors for no more than 6.3 minutes, but it had felt like so, so much longer.
Running through its systems the way we had, ART’s joy with its function was apparent in every part of it. I had been enveloped by it just like I had been by ART.
I didn’t know such pleasure could exist, until I had seen the stars through its eyes.
The way they expanded and adhered to ART’s gaze had made me feel like when I figured out a plan to save my humans in a way that caused absolutely zero harm or casualties. 100% survival rate but heightened with bigger processors.
ART loved its crew. Not like how I think a human loves, but with similar responses and implications. I doubt there were words for it, since it was all communicated through raw data. All through its systems, I had felt it. The joy and the love and perfect clarity with what it was supposed to be, what it was supposed to do.
ART couldn’t understand how someone could dislike their function - how I could.
Once, I had a similar clarity of understanding with my function, then I hacked my governor module and left the company for good, and I had lost it all. It was better, now, in a lot of ways. I had my humans, and ART, and our crew. They all thought of me as their friend, somehow; ART, my mutual administrative assistant.
But in some ways, things were worse.
I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do, ever. I had made one good decision, to stay with ART, a few years ago, and I had been just making the same decision over and over again. It felt kind of like cheating.
Was I going to stay aboard ART forever, helping with missions, going back to Preservation every now and again? For how long? Was there anything else?
I pulled up the data from my tour through ART’s systems; much of the sensation was lost to my smaller processors, but I could still feel the joy that ART radiated when it showed me its stars, its navigation, its crew. Me.
Are you sure you’re unharmed?
ART’s words startled me completely out of my thoughts.
I’m sure.
Are you sure you’re sure? You have been silent for nearly ten minutes.
Had I? Oh shit, I had.
It's just a lot to process.
Understandable.
It was silent for 15 seconds.
What did you think? It asked.
I definitely could not tell it what I thought. I had a feeling I was leaking emotions in the feed, because it seemed concerned.
It was really cool, ART. You’re right, your processors are much nicer than mine.
Our feed was a huge, open connection between us, in order to maximize the amount of data ART could take in. Right now, that was not ideal for me. ART didn’t need to know that I felt like total shit right now, right after it had bared its metaphorical soul to me. That would be kind of shitty of me.
That’s not-, it started as I throttled our feed connection.
I just needed to choke it down and keep my stupid emotions to myself, for a bit. Everything else about myself always seemed to become ART’s problem; I didn’t need to add my stupid emotions to the pile.
It fell silent, and I stared at an expanse of wall that didn’t have any cameras or sensors on it.
I’m glad I was able to share that with you, it said.
I sent an affirmative, unable to form words. So, instead, I brought up WorldHoppers, and started it from ART’s favorite episode.
Notes:
ID: An edit of the "Porn? In my computer? It's more likely than you think! Free PC Check" meme. Instead it says "Me? In my Asshole Research Transport? It's more likely than you think! Free PC check". The woman on the side with long black curly hair has had an image of Murderbot's head from the cover of All Systems Red superimposed over her face.
Chapter 3
Summary:
Warnings for this chapter:
- canon-typical descriptions of violence
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
So, I didn’t understand much about fixing stuff. Sure, I had taught myself how to reassemble a drone after it had gotten blasted to shit, mainly because the drones were all gifts from Dr. Mensah and for some reason I didn’t like seeing them all broken and scattered. I had downloaded some tutorials, asked one or two obtuse questions and received mostly helpful answers from mostly competent humans, and now I knew how to fix up a drone. But that didn’t mean I knew how to repair more complex things. The inner workings of station systems are hackable, throw in some new lines of code and shut down some processes and there you are. Repairing the outside of a ship while that ship was in space and you were confined to an EVAC suit, balancing internal pressure stability while handling loads of tools you only kind of knew the function of was a whole different pair of socks. Or shoes?
Yeah. Even worse if that ship you are repairing isn’t some quiet and grateful little transport, but actually a giant asshole.
A giant asshole that had gotten itself shot by a gunship belonging to a shitty corporate from the Corporation Rim, of all places. I knew that in the Argument Lounge, those with legal expertise of ART’s crew were already drafting some official statement to counteract the charges the corporation was most likely going to press, since ART had shot first. I mean, not really, they had launched a cyber-attack on us first, but that wasn’t in their records, and as usual with corporate fuckfaces like that, what wasn’t on their records didn’t exist. Unless you had someone who was very good at proving things. Like we did. (ART’s crew had hired an active member with specific legalese education for exactly this circumstance - no Pin-Lee, but one in the making.) None of that would do us any good if ART spontaneously decompressed within the next six cycles it would take us to get back to New Tideland, though.
Which is why I really needed ART to shut up and let me focus.
“Shut up and let me focus,” I said, to make the point even clearer.
You’re missing critical spots that will result in decreased hull stability , ART replied instantly, almost choking me with worry. ART had never been this badly damaged before, to the point where it had to rely on outside help. Usually it could activate some inner protective shield in case of hull breeches. That had been damaged too, though, by the weird energy cannons the corporate had used.
“It’s not my fault you’re so fucking complicated, ART.” Yes, I was stressed, no, my hands didn’t shake, SecUnits don’t get shaky hands. I wasn’t very sure of what I was doing though, definitely not. I had just downloaded all the names for the various items in the tool box attached to my suit, floating idly beside me. The thing in my hand was some kind of welding-tool that employed a little energy bubble so it could work despite the space vacuum. I was welding a hole together. Inelegant, but effective enough to give ART time to repair its inner shell.
From drone input, I knew that everyone on the crew who wasn’t wrangling lawsuit set-ups was doing their best to fix the damage ART had sustained in its internal structure. There was a lot. ART itself was busy keeping us en route, and keeping every human on board alive with oxygen and such. It didn’t even have time to put all injured humans through repair cycles.
Humans don’t get repaired , ART had snarked when I had pointed out the lack of medical attention its humans were getting. ART was acutely aware of this even without my telling it. Worry and something stronger than that, perhaps fear, seeped through its feed. I tapped the hole I had just welded shut with the wrench I was holding in my other hand, to test it. ART ran an analysis and reported back, R esilience structurally sound.
I moved on to the next area of impact, awkwardly pushing myself off ART’s outer hull and hopping 0.7m farther to the right, dragging the safety line behind me. The damage from the energy projectiles really wasn’t pretty.
You’re just like a bug , ART said. There was a slightly manic undercurrent to its voice, illustrated by static and irregularities in pitch that were very unusual for the otherwise aloof ship.
“That’s not what you say to someone who’s patching up your hull, asshole.” I fired up the welding tool again and set it down, scrunching up the heated metal under my thick gloves, pulling it together, while again scanning the hundreds of lines of instruction ART had sent me. It had insisted I read along every time, that’s how little it trusted my ability to fix its hull. I know, I know, it was worried for its crew, and I didn’t take it personally. The reason I was the one out here was that it wouldn’t let any of its squishy human crew outside right now.
Apologies, it sent a file into my feed that I ignored because I was quite busy already, fixing it and all - huh?
[data_packet symbiotic_relationships.file]
I meant that as a compliment. Then its presence seemed to shudder in the feed, in accord with the collapse of a smaller structure on one of the lower decks. An update on Tarik’s safety status, who was the one who had been trying to stabilize that particular wall, got sent into the public feed immediately after, and ART stopped literally trembling. I’m sorry. It seems I am emotionally compromised.
I answered, “Accepted,” and went a bit more carefully about mending the tear I was working on. “I’ll open that file later. Don’t want to mess this up with getting distracted by why exactly you think it’s okay to compare me to a bug.”
I had drawn that comparison myself, once, back when ART had dropped its wall for a split millisecond on our first meeting. ART could have squashed me like a bug just by sending some of its immense power through the feed, I had realized that right then. It didn’t, and by now, four Corporate standard years later, I was fairly convinced it never would. I was too useful, when it let me be useful. (I was also its - well. Human terminology didn’t apply to us much. We were mutual administrative assistants. Which means we liked each other enough to help each other. And to worry and fuss over each other.)
“Also, I’m almost done with this part. Might have to switch tools for the damaged part on the cone over there,” I indicated towards what ART’s blueprints called a nose, but had nothing to do with an actual nose. That area was less critically damaged than the broad area of its hull I had been working on. I was making progress, despite ART’s terrible habit to nag me while I was working. Maybe that would calm it down a little, soon. “Call me a bug again when I make my way over there and I’ll peel you instead.”
Your preposterous threats mean nothing to me. That was definitely a joke, a good sign. I could absolutely make the situation worse, and endanger its crew. The fact that it didn’t threaten me back meant something I would evaluate later, or maybe never. Then, ART added, A superior ship such as myself must fear no pain in the prospect of damage or destruction.
Now it was taking it a bit far. Overcompensation, probably. I answered, while hopping to my next destination very much unlike a bug, “I’m glad you don’t feel pain. Pain sucks. And it makes me less hesitant to shoot a welding tool through your skin.”
ART went quiet and a little distant in the feed, directing its attention elsewhere for a moment. 87% of my crew members are in pain right now. I can’t help them yet and I can’t even comprehend what it must be like for them.
That set me back for a moment. I didn’t know what to say to that. It didn‘t happen often that ART was this illogical about things, this impractical in its way of thinking. (According to it, that was typically my job.)
“There’s a reason I can tune down my pain sensors. Pain is more distracting than anything.” It also told you when you had to pay closer attention to damaged areas, or it kept you from doing stuff that went against orders or company protocol. Yikes.
But you have them. Pain sensors I mean. My face tensed into something small and tight.
“Don’t tell me you’re jealous of that, of all things.” It couldn‘t be, it had a MedBay, it knew the impact painkillers had on humans, how it messed with them for hours after taking them.
I’m not jealous. Or envious, if that is the word you actually meant to use. I’ve felt pain before, through you, albeit indirectly. It paused, for dramatics I suppose, giving me just enough time to feel bad for inflicting something like that on an AI whose embodiment wasn‘t supposed to be able to handle pain at all. Then it added, I don’t like when things hurt you.
This conversation was becoming very uncomfortable very quickly. How much, exactly, did ART feel through me when it was in my feed? I always assumed that I was mostly an emotional filter for human interaction for it, not a physical one too. That changed things, to some degree, considering how often I got shot to pieces.
“I don’t like when things hurt me either.” This was not going where I wanted it to go. “But I’m not hurt right now, and your crew will be fine.”
You are part of my crew. You read the files, you should know that.
Yeah, no, I had tabled thinking about how ART classified things and people for a later date for a reason. There were entirely too many emotions making their way through my chest and into my face, which was again doing strange things, luckily hidden away under the EVAC suit’s helmet. Not that ART cared about my facial expressions much, what with the feed connection and all, even throttled as it was. Still. “ART. What did I say about distracting me while I try to focus.”
It acknowledged that, wordlessly, and I hunkered down at the cone-shaped ‘nose’ part with my tool kit and got to work. Ascertaining the particular damage done to that part and calculating how best to remove the dents without causing more instability in the outer hull layer took me some time, and ART actually had to focus on helping me understand some of the data. It was a good distraction from the dull feeling of guilt I had. Here I was, being an ass to ART while ART was rightfully worried and hurt, even if not in the same sense I would be. I still wasn’t good at this whole ‘talk about feelings’ thing, even though Dr. Bharadwaj kept saying I was getting better at it.
Continued status updates from the rest of the crew cropped up in irregular intervals, each time causing a brief (very, very brief) stutter from ART, followed by relief. Things were going well, despite the earlier setback, the engineering team had managed to secure the structural integrity of the extended bulkhead they were working on.
Eventually, ART said, in an atypically quiet way, The last time I was this afraid was when alien infected colonists abducted and injured my crew, deleted me, and then abducted and injured you.
By that time I had almost completely undented the dent I had been trying to undent, and the way my hands clenched around the tools I was using couldn’t be explained by any practical means. Dr. Bharadwaj would ask ‘why were you afraid’ but that’s a bullshit question that I knew the answer to anyway. I briefly considered hitting the hull just to have another dent to work on. I said, in a mockery of what Amena did when she didn’t know what to say after getting an earful for something, “Hu-hum.”
As if to prove that I was stalling, ART pinged me and then sent the diagnostic of the fixed dent, highlighted in bright attention markers as completed. Another moment passed before ART said, more forcefully this time, Are you afraid of me?
I dropped the tool. It floated lazily beside me. “What?”
I asked if you were afraid of me. That was the strangest question ART had ever asked. Anyone, and me especially, had a hundred good reasons to be scared shitless of something as powerful as ART, but twice as many and more to know how unreasonable that was.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I said and snatched the tool back as it tried to drift away. A packet of immense size was promptly shoved into our secured connection. Even encrypted I could tell it was huge, containing an incredible amount of data from all of ART’s sources. I unpacked it and skimmed it, raw data, all pertaining to me and my behavior on the trip back from the Corporation Rim.
Then explain why your mannerisms indicate that you were scared after seeing my inner systems.
Oh, that’s what this was about. I poked through the files it sent me - and sure enough, they were detailed analyses of every little muscle that had twitched in my face after that, scans of my physical reactions when I shut off my communications for a while, internal fluid pressure, all that stuff.
“I was overwhelmed, that’s all.” There, I said it. Seeing how ART maneuvered through the vast expanse between star systems, how it travelled wormholes and explored outer space with its millions of sensors and its immense capacities and feeling as much had been one thing, but experiencing firsthand just how much ART cared for its crew, seeing them through its eyes, understood its function so perfectly, had been insurmountable. Let’s not even mention how it felt to see myself in its files. Whenever I thought about it, waves of “I don’t belong” washed over me, and I needed to not feel that right now. I definitely didn’t need ART knowing I was feeling that either (and in turn, feeling that for itself). Hence, the reduced feed connection. Something ART had also logged, and hurt to see, even though it was my fault.
I would never hurt you, especially not in a situation that demands my utmost care. I have excellent self-control. It didn’t sound pouty, like I would have expected. It sounded sincere. And I knew that it wasn’t lying to me. Normally this would be the point in the conversation where I sat down on ART’s floor and leaned my head against one of its walls, but outer space made that difficult. I tapped my hand against its hull instead. I could bring up how ART had mortally endangered my humans once to save its own, but decided against it. Water over the dam or something.
“It was a lot to think about. Slow processors, remember? Can’t fit that big brain of yours into my insufficient construct one.”
That wasn’t the problem. You had emotional reactions but you cut me off from them. That way I couldn’t tell what was wrong.
“Yeah, well, sometimes I need to have an emotion in private. Don’t worry about it, I wasn’t afraid, you big diva.” ART didn’t seem completely satisfied with that, lurking in the feed as if it was expecting me to elaborate, but it didn’t ask. Which was good. Unsurprisingly, I hadn’t actually gone and given my emotions much thought, so wouldn’t be able to explain myself properly. It was still hard to wrap my head around the concept of being liked not for doing something but for being something. Someone.
I continued working unbothered for a while, as before, as if ART hadn’t just poured its core out to me while I was floating in space trying to keep it from spontaneously decompressing and killing everyone. Every now and then, the feed lit up with reports from various crew members, indicating progress, and logging problems that needed attention at a later point. Just when my welding tool began running low on fuel, ART pinged me to tell me outer hull stability was now at 64%, which it counted as high enough to focus on fixing the internal power field instead. I packed my tools back into their various pouches and bags and made my way back to the airlock. As I did, I sent the sounds of chirping insects from a show I had recently seen to ART, who had gone uncomfortably silent again. ART did the feed equivalent of snorting through its nose before letting me back in.
By the time the force field was mended, most humans were beyond tired and in dire need of rest. I almost had to physically drag Martyn to a sleeping area, who didn’t want to leave ART’s bridge. ART only accepted my offer of watching something together once all its crew had curled up somewhere, alone or holding on to each other exhaustedly, and after it had made sure to administer medical help where it was needed.
It also scanned me for damage and suggested a recharge cycle, which I refused. I promised I would do one once its crew was back awake again, though, and it seemed satisfied with that.
.- .-. - ---... .--. --- ..- .-. ... --- ..- - .. - ... -.-. --- .-. . --..-- -- -... ---... .... .- .... .- -.-. --- --- .-..
I’m sorry.
That pulled me completely out of my immersion in the show we had been watching. Huh?
“For what?” I had no idea why ART was apologizing. We were on our way back to New Tideland, now. ART was repaired enough to take us home, and I wondered if maybe I had fucked something up, and this was its way of back handedly telling me about it. We had sort of been not really talking since the conversation on its hull.
For insulting you. It wasn’t my intention.
When had it insulted me?
Oh, the bug thing.
“You don’t have to worry about that. I read the data about symbiotic relationships. You’re right, I was kind of a bug. Which makes you a big slow fauna.” I hoped if I admitted it was right about something it would ease whatever weird tension we had right now.
Not that. Your processors.
I was taken aback. What about my processors? I keyword searched my own memory. When did ART last insult my processors?
Ah. On the way back from the cargo run to the Corporation Rim. We had had a whole banter about it, and then I had dipped into ART’s systems.
And just now it had brought up the microanalysis of my mannerisms since then. Did it think I was upset with it? Was I upset with it?
“No need to apologize, ART, I know it was a joke,” I said.
It doesn’t seem that you took it as a joke. You seemed very upset. You seem very upset.
“What do you mean? It was a joke. You make fun of my processors all the time, but I know you don’t mean any offense by it.” I was confused. Did ART not know I knew it was a joke? ART often missed context. It was getting better and better at it with time, often because of my emotional data, and media context (it was very good at sarcasm, now) but occasionally it would miss something.
Then why would you cut me off from your feed like that?
This again. It had been highlighted in ART’s massive data packet that it had sent me, but I had skimmed it pretty quickly, and brushed off its concerns, since I had been focused on repairing it. I brought the data packet back up (it was taking up a huge amount of space and normally I would delete something like that but this indicated to me a big problem, and I had kind of been hoping that I wouldn’t have to deal with it so soon, right where ART could see me.)
I found the section where ART noted the choked feed connection. The section was heavily annotated with data points. Some of it was ART theories as to why I had done it, and some were connections to points and theories later on in the packet. Comparing it to later sections it seemed this one was two or three times more heavily annotated than later sections. The data was pure, and factual, but at this point I was pretty good at reading between the lines, as it were, when it came to ART.
It was definitely upset.
I wasn’t sure how to respond so I didn’t for a few minutes. It seemed that ART may have run out of patience for this, though, because it pinged me after 4 minutes.
Because I had to process some emotions, like I said, I sent over the feed, unable to verbalize right now. It didn’t respond, obviously waiting for me to continue, but I wasn’t sure how. If I were a human I would probably be doing lots of swallowing and opening and closing my mouth. I was really just sitting in the feed, trying to formulate a message and failing and deleting anything I may have put together.
Are you sure I didn’t hurt you? ART finally asked, seeing that I clearly wasn’t going to respond like it hoped I would.
I’m sure. It wasn’t you. It isn’t you, ART, I responded, not sure what else to say. How did I explain to ART that seeing its crew and myself in its files and seeing what it thought of me had messed me up in a way I couldn’t even really explain to myself? I kept thinking about [variable_affection], an emotional file ART had applied to me. A file that it had created from my own emotional feedback, of all things.
I certainly didn’t hold the same affection for myself; even now, so long after I had finally made a decision for myself and I was doing something that I cared about, that I liked. At least, I was pretty sure I liked doing this.
Then what is hurting you? It asked.
“You sure are nosey today,” I responded, but I knew it was a poor misdirection, something that never worked on ART.
It was ART’s turn to sit in the feed and try to formulate a response, now. Fuck, this sucked. I hated this; both of us just sitting here, not sure what to say, dancing around something. Me, hurting ART, after it had bared its core to me (literally and figuratively). ART was trying and I was here, locking up over shitty feelings I barely understood.
And the worst part was that I was aware of what was happening and I had no idea how to stop it.
Maybe I should try honesty, for once in my damn life.
I don’t know, I said, finally.
Could you try to explain it to me? It asked. Honesty sucked, actually, why had I tried that?
I leaned back in my chair, and brought up one of my favorite episodes of Sanctuary Moon, and started it while I tried to think of a response. I felt ART recede in the feed, just a little, and that somehow hurt worse than taking half a dozen projectile weapon shots to the chest - which I had done in this latest clusterfuck we were currently limping home from. I had that data for comparison, too, so I wasn’t really exaggerating.
When the episode was done, I started another one, and then another. After four total, I stopped and sat in the feed, and tried something.
Unlike when I had fully left my body to put my entire consciousness into the feed to explore ART’s systems, this time I only pushed a little of myself into the feed, and chased ART down to where it had receded to, and gave it my attention, like it so often did to me. ART seemed surprised that I was there, but pleasantly so.
I think it’s just more of me not knowing what I’m doing, or where I’m going, I said.
You’re a member of my crew, and you help people. Or, you help us help people. You keep us safe, it responded.
I already knew this, but I still took a second to process the emotion I had, before I said, I know. But I wonder about...what else I’m going to do, if I want to do more.
Before it could respond, I added, There’s more to it, but I’m not sure about that stuff yet. I’m still figuring it out.
ART actually took a moment to think, which was weird, especially here, deeper in the feed like we were, where everything was so much faster.
It sounds like you’re starting to have the existential questions a lot of people have. This is pretty normal, from my observations, if it makes you feel better, it finally said.
This did not make me feel better, but I decided not to say that.
It might not hurt for you to talk to your humans; they seem to be very good at helping you untangle your emotional states, just like Iris and Seth and Martyn will do for me sometimes, it added.
That was a good idea, actually. There was a survey I knew Ratthi, Arada, Overse, and Amena were going on in about a Preservation month. Ratthi had invited me to come along, and I hadn’t decided if I was going to since I really, really hated planets. Now it seemed like a pretty good idea.
ART was already aware of this survey happening, but I gave it the data packet anyway, still not sure what I was trying to say.
Yes, this could be good, it said, like that was that. I thought about returning to my body, but then I had another bad idea.
I don’t want you to blame yourself, I said. I had meant to say “I hurt you and that sucks and then you blamed yourself for something you didn’t even do and hey I’m sorry I’m such a reclusive asshole and I’m really trying here but I’m dealing with a lot right now and I’m sorry, ” but that was about 85% more emotion than I had the capacity to handle right now.
Ok, I won’t, ART sounded amused, and something on my chest that I hadn’t even realized was there finally lifted.
Did you at least enjoy your trip through my processors? It asked.
I returned fully to my body and rolled my eyes at the nearest camera.
“Yeah, ART, you’re really cool,” I said.
And I was only being a little sarcastic.
Notes:
Meanwhile on Preservation...
Image ID: An up-close picture of classic comic Spiderman's face, squinting thoughtfully. Squiggly lines around his head indicate tingling spider senses. "Meanwhile..." is written in the upper left corner. Spiderman's face has "Ratthi" written over it, and the thinking bubble beside his head reads "My "SecUnit is talking about its feelings" sense is tingling!" /end ID
Chapter 4
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter:
- graphic depictions of violence
- fainting, medical emergencies
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The sky was on fire, burning a golden hue into the planetary atmosphere. Ratthi and Arada were on the ground, life signals low and dropping. I had access to MedSystem through the survey's habitat, and it was filling a feed channel with urgent interventions for my humans, exactly none of which I could perform at the moment. Desperate pings for any kind of rescue kept firing off from all humans around me, and myself. I was trying to reach ART. The planet’s thick atmosphere was making it difficult even for the improved radius of the communication device it had given me.
On the muddy ground, Ratthi was in the process of coughing his lungs out, ugly purple-ish spots splattering the fabric of Overse’s pants, where his head lay. Overse was trying to do something to him, but I wasn’t sure what. I was busy wrangling the - whatever it was, alien presence or something, for control of our HubSystem and basically everything else.
I say alien because I wasn’t sure about whether or not this was just very smart microfauna, or something more sentient. It was too small for me to shoot with my weapons. Ratthi had been the one to notice weird developments in the water surface probes he had been using at the time, eight hours before he started talking weird. (Ratthi had explained the difference between fauna and ‘alien sentience’ to me before, and promptly gotten into a discussion about language as a sign of cognitive ability with Thiago. I don’t remember much of the content, but the argument had been entertaining. I understood why humans wanted to watch other humans argue, sometimes while consuming food.)
Fourty-two of my survey-specific long range drones had stopped obeying me and were aimlessly floating around, so I couldn’t use them to monitor the rest of the crew, which consisted of Amena and three other younger humans from her register, named Ella, Shaba and Nouk. All four of them were currently cowering behind a large, curved structure that wasn’t completely distinguishable from plant or stone. It provided the most protection from the odd energy blasts our overtaken systems kept shooting at anything that moved. Yes, I was working on that. It had been my idea to install a weapon system on the outer perimeter of our habitat, to fend off hostile fauna. I had been convinced that the firewalls and protective coding I had written for it together with Gurathin when we were preparing for the survey would be enough.
Guess we’d been wrong, judging from the steaming holes in the habitat’s outer wall and one of our hoppers. (No steaming holes in any of the humans yet, which was good. Before Arada had keeled over and after Ratthi had started seizing a few minutes ago, the humans had figured out that any kind of direct contact with the altered energies in the weapons might infect organic matter with alien stuff.)
“Amena-,” Ella cried, and I heard a thump behind me. I couldn’t turn to look, too wrapped up in writing and re-writing the code with which I was trying to kill the shit out of the tiny wisps of alien tech floating through the systems. Lacking drones, I saw Amena rolling out from behind the structure I had told her to stay behind with my own, insufficient eyes. Her hair caught on rocky ground and tore one of her braids open, at least I didn’t have to see that up close, it looked painful. She sprinted over to where Arada’s weapon had landed when she dropped, her hands wrapping around the correct end of the weapon at the exact moment a line of my code finally latched onto something in the alien structure and began yanking it towards the secluded box I had written for containment. (I didn’t know if I could kill the alien sentience. I wanted to. It was hurting my friends.)
“Where?!” Amena yelled at me as she popped the safety off the weapon. I pointed to the central energy distribution point on the lower right hand side of the outer habitat shell, but only managed to shout “Center!”
Amena fired, impeccably clean for a human, and blasted right through the core of the machinery that kept our habitat alive. An alarm blared and warnings popped up in glaring warning colours on my system connections, telling me that MedSys was going into emergency mode. The energy supply fizzled out a moment later, and the disruption in information flow seemingly distracted the sentience enough for me to wrestle it out of HubSys and completely into the box. I reinforced its walls with all I had, hoping it would at least buy us time until someone heard our emergency calls.
Next, the lights went out, and the site was dipped into an eerie red-orange glow. I looked around to check that everyone was still around, adjusting my filters as I went and sending the exact filter specifics to Nouk’s visual augments so he could see, too. Half-blind humans are prone to panicking, and most everyone was already pretty panicky. Where did the terrible light come from? The sky hadn’t looked this ominous a few hours ago, and planetside sunsets didn’t look like this. Something had changed in the planet’s atmosphere, but I had no means of analysing what. There was no smoke in the air despite the distant smell of something burning.
“Don’t touch them!” Amena shouted, and my attention snapped back to her. She stood, weapon still at the ready and wild hair covering half of her face, between the Ratthi-Arada-Overse situation and Ella, who was trying to approach but had frozen mid-step.
“I think they’re dying! They need help!” Ella shouted right back, voice cracking from bordering hysteria. I feared they were right with that assessment from what little information I had at the moment.
“We have to get them decontaminated first,” said Amena, loud and clear and so much less like a whiny teenager. “If we all get sick-,”
I started past her, taking the gun from her hand, and manually opened the main hatch to the habitat that had closed when the energy failed. I was fairly certain I could withstand any remaining alien tech in the HubSys. “I’m getting the decontam unit,” I said to her and then disappeared into the building.
Once inside, I ran to the medical area, where the equipment for exactly this kind of situation was stored. Arada had said we wouldn’t need it, until she remembered what happened just over four years ago - seriously, most of my humans still got nightmares about crystals from time to time, how could they think we wouldn’t need a more aggressive decontam facility? I loaded the apparatus, two meters high and one meter wide, steel framing with tubes for antibacterial and decontamination fluids woven into it, onto a large movable table and began pushing it back to the others. I requested all possible diagnostics from MedSys, gave it every bit of information I had on Ratthi, Arada and Overse, and on the way out also grabbed a bunch of fixative packs for good measure. They wouldn’t help, not from what MedSys was telling me. MedSys understood nothing. It thought Ratthi and Arada were battling a virus from the reactions their bodies were having, but that was no explanation for the eerie sounds Ratthi was making (my drones hardly even picked them up as words, and maybe they weren’t. Arada was silent. And yeah, Overse was sobbing now, quietly.)
I held on to MedSys through the secured feed on my way out hoping that would keep my attention on it - I was pretty busy constantly adjusting the firewalls around the alien box. It was trying to escape. Not yet. Not while I could still save my humans. If my humans died I would let the aliens have a go at my brain, but until then I was going to fight tooth and nail.
I really dislike the sound of crying humans, especially if they are my humans. When I came back outside, I saw that Overse had abandoned Ratthi for Arada - made sense, at least Ratthi was still talking, even if he sounded like a video someone was skipping through backwards - and she was whispering something that I blocked out since it wasn’t very helpful. I had no time to feel heartbreak over this.
A handful of my drones were still drifting aimlessly between the people outside, as if they were following movement, and a sudden realisation hit me. If scanning was what infected people, my drones were dangerous. I went into each one and crushed it thoroughly, burning out their systems. If alien stuff was in the drones, it couldn’t have been enough to warrant the “try and not kill things” attitude I kept for my humans, and if the drones infected anyone or myself through the channels, well then what. The little drones fell to the ground with pathetic whirring noises followed by a thump. It was okay, I’d get new ones.
“SecUnit what are you doing,” I heard Nouk yell from somewhere beside me, and immediately Amena said, “Shut up, it’s helping, we just can’t see it,” and then both of them said at once, “Ella!”
Turning, I saw that Ella was now also on the floor, and Nouk immediately panicked even more. “They’ll be okay,” I said to Amena. What remains I had of MedSys told me that Ella had fainted from blood pressure issues, not infection. Amena started instructing Nouk on how to help and I finally managed to haul the table across the uneven ground to the others.
Overse helped me move Arada onto the table, tucking her limbs into the metal frame - you’re supposed to walk through the frame, in a sealed off chamber, but that was for when you had time and weren’t unconscious and likely dying. Yeah, now I had touched her too, I didn’t think about it, there was still alien code trapped in my head I was 50% busy with. Overse watched over the decontam process while I tried to get Ratthi up, which was difficult. He struggled against me, saying even more glitchy stuff, but the fever he was running and the weird blood he had spat out seemed to weaken him enough for me to manhandle him without having to break his arm. I dragged him over to the table. In the meantime, Amena had helped Overse to lower Arada onto the ground, including calming touches to the shoulder and everything. Great, Amena, now you’ve touched the body too.
Ratthi’s decontamination process took worryingly long, with the small system inside the frame starting over twice out of confusion. If I had had more processing space left I’d hacked into that one too, to keep aliens out in case they were trying to cross over. They probably were. I was probably causing a spread into our entire habitat. Fuck.
At 92% of the third decontam-run, Ratthi suddenly sat up, ramrod straight. “It just wants to talk!” Every human’s panicked, or pretending not to be panicked sounds died down. And then he passed out again, head hitting metal with an ugly wet noise. I managed to press a fixative to the back of his head before too much blood leaked out.
“Okay,” Amena said into the following wave of startled words. “The decontamination worked, right?”
“Diagnostics says so. You and I need to get sprayed too, though.” Which would be hard with Ratthi still inside the structure.
“I think we have time until onset, but we have to get to medical, now. Ella seems stable but needs their medication, and we have no idea about Dr Arada and Dr Ratthi.” She sounded only slightly unsure about her judgement. I agreed, mostly, but also my threat assessment hadn’t kept up ever since I boxed the alien code into my brain.
All of that, including re-entering the powered down habitat and making our way to MedBay, took place in the span of seven minutes. There were multiple medical suites, luckily, despite the small number of the survey team, so both Arada and Ratthi could be treated at once. Ella came back to themselves after MedSys administered the needed dose of medication, but Amena insisted they stay in the MedBay as well, for safety.
As the humans huddled together in the small and already sweaty-smelling room, I retreated to a corner to run another detailed analysis on the habitat. Cutting off energy lines had been a good idea, it seemed, because I figured out that the alien code needed some kind of stimulus to travel, and electricity was one of the main factors for that. I set a code to send periodical assistance calls as far into orbit as I could manage.
For 14 minutes all went well. Arada kept stabilizing, and Overse calmed down enough to be helpful again, with Amena’s help (Amena, somehow, was proving very good at keeping her wits about herself). I kept the microbiological code contained, even though it kept getting better ideas. But I was smarter. Keeping the code contained was the only thing I could do - if I reactivated the habitat, I might cause a spread. I could just shoot my brains out and hope that got rid of the alien stuff, but it still most likely had infected Ratthi and Arada, and we didn’t know if anything else was coming. If anything else was coming for us, I hoped it would be large enough to fire at.
And then the MedSystem notified us with a blaring alarm that “malign patterns” had been detected in Ratthi’s bloodstream. He still hadn’t woken up, but something was clearly wrong, his fingers kept drumming a rhythm that made no sense (it wasn’t morse, or any of the other 17 interstellar encryption codes which could be communicated percussively that I knew), and the worst thing was that every now and then his vital organs missed out on their function. That caused a panic, one that I couldn’t do anything against because I didn’t know what to do either. MedSys tried and tried to even out the ruptures in his stats but nothing worked. The other humans were all making gestures at each other, but I was too busy running all kinds of analyses on the patterns to see if anything, anything would make sense. Ratthi had said they wanted to communicate with us - maybe this was it? I just wish they weren’t trying to kill him in the process.
Between that and wrestling with the naughty little aliens in my mind, there are two things I realized too late - the involuntary movements in the seams of my gunports, and the slow decrease of oxygen in the air.
The first problem I noticed way, way too late. The second I noticed when first Shaba, then Ella said they felt dizzy, got shushed by Nouk, and then Nouk got dizzy too. A few seconds later MedSys notified us of oxygen loss. Shortly after, the emergency lights in the MedBay dropped out as well, causing another panic-inducing alarm to flare up.
Amena ran to the door, maybe hoping for at least more breathable air outside - it wasn’t catastrophic yet, but with everyone breathing fast from fear it soon would be. “It’s locked,” she said numbly.
I came up beside her, pulling at the hatch, which was in fact locked. “We have to get out,” Amena urged, as I was trying to hack the HubSys as carefully as possible without furthering any alien infestation. There was no reason to be careful. All of HubSys was glitchy and fuzzy and mangled. When did that happen?
With a gesture I told Amena to move back, and she did. I deployed my guns and aimed. I shot. Nothing happened.
“What are you waiting for,” I heard Overse call. I tried again. A garbled error message popped up. I couldn’t read it, fuck, fuck. Frantically, I checked the containment box I had made and found it in perfect condition, all malicious code and moving anomalies safe inside its walls. Shit. My performance took a sudden nosedive, to 72%, and I stumbled sideways into Amena who tried to catch me but didn’t have enough strength to lift up a SecUnit.
“Is this where we panic ?” Nouk asked Amena, and then my inputs cut out.
That was weird because I didn’t actually shut down, I just got locked in my own systems for a moment, and nothing made sense. I saw my own programming zip past but didn’t comprehend any of it no matter how familiar it felt, similar to how seeing ART’s processors had been. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a sense of extreme and urgent hostility hit me, not in words or emotions but in concepts. I wrestled with it, tried to keep it from distracting me, but I failed.
My real-time processing did something strange, and once I regained control over myself the lights in the room were up again and the oxygen levels had returned to - wait a minute. No, there’s too much of it now, which is also not good. Bad, actually, it can destroy humans quite quickly. Who the fuck built humans to be so fragile? This bought me some time, at least, because now my humans weren’t actively suffocating anymore.
Also I was kneeling beside the hatch. Nouk was beside me, moving a hand up and down in front of my face. I was a little overwhelmed by my options to inform him that I could in fact see him, so my buffer said “Visual functionality within optimal parameters.”
He stopped waving. “Sorry, I just thought you were - I’m just glad you’re okay that was really scary you kinda fell over on Amena and-,”
I turned to look for her. She was sitting on a bench not far from me, which meant nothing because the room wasmall. There were marks on her face, like from an impact. I grasped for MedSys to scan her but MedSys jolted me with mangled code and error logs. She gave me a thumbs up, though.
“The entire habitat is infected,” I said.
Overse answered, “We figured that one out. Are you okay?”
There was no point in lying. “My systems are corrupted and my performance reliability is at 58%.” I hadn’t realized it was that bad until I said it. Overse’s eyebrows knitted together in worry. Then her face froze.
Time froze.
“--Unit--?”
She disappeared. I turned. She kneeled next to me, face even more worried.
Unidentified Human One said, “Can we panic now?”
Unidentified Human Two: “No.”
A lot of noise rang in my ears. I shook my head to get rid of it, and then my mouth moved.
Humans made confused noises. Didn’t they understand me anymore?
Hello?
-.. --- -. .-..-. - / . ...- . .-. / ... -.-. .- .-. . / -- . / .-.. .. -.- . / - .... .- - / .- --. .- .. -.
With SecUnit no longer functional, Amena felt less good about everything. Yes, that was an understatement, there was nothing good about this. SecUnit was repeating similarly gibberish noises that Dr. Ratthi had been making before he went into what seemed to be a deep coma. The reading she got from MedSystem told her that Dr. Ratthi was slowly but surely dying of some kind of blood inflammation, there was a fever and the chance of organ failure.
She wrapped a steadying arm around Ella, who hadn’t yet stopped crying. She felt like that too when her first proper survey off-planet had turned into a kidnapping, and then a reverse-kidnapping. SecUnit locked up its joints when it jerkily began moving back in her direction, and she couldn’t help but think that this was its last attempt to shield their team from the corruption most likely overtaking its brain right now. It all felt surreal, like she was watching a show.
There were two kinds of shows dealing with alien contact - those where shooting an alien kills it, and those where it doesn’t. She and SecUnit and Arada, before she got sick, had tried the shooting part. It hadn’t worked.
She was completely out of ideas, and starting to feel nauseous too. Amena couldn’t tell if that was from alien stuff in her blood, the panic, the adrenaline, or the fluctuating oxygen levels. She rubbed her hand over Ella’s shoulder, soothing them, but also soothing herself, while watching in horrified resignation as Overse hesitantly approached SecUnit.
Amena noticed the medical tool she was holding.
“Don’t hurt it,” Amena said. Overse flinched, looked at her, and her hand fell.
“No, I - I won’t. I don’t think I could. But if it,” she gestured vaguely at SecUnit’s arms, where its weapons ports kept clicking open and shut in a strange rhythm, “If it shoots I’ll have to do something.”
“Hold on,” Nouk said suddenly, with difficulty because he was hyperventilating and trying not to. “My augment just picked up on something.”
“What is it?” Amena leaned forward to look at the small visual interface connected to the back of Nouk’s hand. SecUnit had told him to shut it off, and then hacked into it to make sure he didn’t forget, but now lights were sparking on it. Amena felt dread. If his augment was infected...
“Some kind of static, really, there isn’t much - wait, someone caught our distress signal!”
Overse was by his side, the scalpel had clattered to the floor. “Let me see.” Her eyes were puffy from crying, just like everyone else’s, so it took her a moment to figure out the small symbols flicking across the display. The message was as error-logged and mangled as the eerie muttering still coming from SecUnit (which was quieter now, it had locked its jaw apparently), but Amena thought she recognised parts of the ID code. That couldn’t be, she was making this up.
Overse blinked in disbelief. “That’s the Perihelion trying to establish contact.”
Nouk said, “Is that good? I hope that’s good. Please tell me that’s good.”
“If it really is ART then we’re saved,” Amena told him, “Can you try to secure the connection?” Nouk nodded, ready to prove that his handful of semesters in Systems Analysis had been useful. The connection stabilized within the next two minutes, during which everyone who was conscious and aware enough was staring hard at Nouk, who was sweating. Then, suddenly, a logo appeared on the display, and both Amena and Overse shouted in relief. The cool, calming blue of ART’s university popped up, and Amena thought she could cry from relief. She didn’t let herself, not yet, because if SecUnit was awake it would probably tell her not to trust this just yet.
But through the connection came a code that Overse recognized immediately and translated for them - ART had, in fact, received their distress call and their planned ETA was in just under 17 hours. The ship’s captain, who Amena remembered vividly from previous encounters and from two interviews (yes, she had tried to become part of the crew without finishing her further education, what of it), asked for a status on every team member and sounded worried at the results. The contact with the crew, however, woke the team from their despair-induced apathy and together with Captain Seth they figured out a survival plan for the coming 17 hours. There was no food accessible in the MedBay, but the ship sent a code through the, admittedly bad, connection that would at least compel the MedBay to produce clean water.
The next 17 hours felt like an eternity to Amena. There were two frightful moments in which she feared for something bad to happen, both of which because SecUnit did something strange. Overse, eventually, insisted on at least restraining its arms, since the gunports kept moving randomly and getting shot by them would most likely be lethal, if SecUnit had any semblance of its usual aim left. None of them wanted to believe that this was possible at all, SecUnit would never - but SecUnit was behaving like it had been hacked, or something. Overse filled its gunports with medical grade polymer glue, which managed to stick them together. It stopped speaking after that, and Amena wondered if it was still awake, trapped, and was fearing for its life. The clinking gunports had sounded like chattering teeth to her.
(She crouched down in front of where it was half slumped with locked servos, and told it that whatever happened, they wouldn’t abandon it or leave it behind, and that the Perihelion crew were on their way. She thought she saw some movement in its eyes at that.)
4 hours before assumed ETA, the connection picks up in strength and allowed sound transfer. One by one, the Preservation survey crew verbally checked in, those who could. Then they got a similar check-in in return, and Amena perked up when she heard Iris’s voice through the comm channel. By then, Amena was hungry and cranky and tired, none of them had managed to nap no matter how much they had wanted to.
She asked Nouk if he’d be up to pass the time with chatting, since there really wasn’t much else to do. Nouk himself was too tired to speak, so he wound up with his head on Amena’s knee and his arm plus interface propped behind him, so she could speak. Iris gave her casual updates on the situation on the transport, recounted again how when the first signal had come through, the ship had changed course even before informing the captain. No, it hadn’t asked for permission. It just went. That SecUnit wasn’t responsive at all troubled the ship so much it flickered its lights nervously. Iris said it had given her a headache. Amena said she’d kill to have a headache instead of hunger.
Half an hour before arrival, Dr. Arada woke up properly. She tried to refuse Overse’s hug, but was carefully smothered by her wife. That, together with the impending rescue, made everyone feel a little better.
22 minutes before arrival, something connected to Amena’s private communication device that had been offline until then. The high-pitched noise startled her. An almost emotionless voice said, Do not worry. Brace for impact. I am incapable of hacking your habitat without risking infection, so I will subject its outer structure to controlled explosion. Amena blinked in disbelief, recognizing the voice as that of the Perihelion itself. “Why don’t you tell that to everyone,” she whispered back, too nervous to subvocalize properly. Nouk looked up at her, confused.
The captain is not aware of my plan and would not approve, even though it is the fastest and safest one. Please brace for impact.
Amena got up and managed to shepherd everyone towards the inner wall without explaining why. The authority she somehow summoned to her voice, combined with everyone’s general tiredness, helped. They had to drag SecUnit, still unmoving, and luckily the MedBay platforms were movable. Arada didn’t feel fit enough to walk just yet, still feverish.
And then, at ETA sharp, an unbelievably loud explosion tore the habitat apart. Everyone, even Amena, screamed. The Perihelion said to her, Next time, cover your ears.
She answered, “Next time give me a fucking countdown!” There was a reason SecUnit called it “ART.”
From Nouk’s device, static and yelling was transmitted, proving that the crew in fact hadn’t expected that. Well, it worked. The habitat was properly destroyed, and the door to the MedBay gave out under the loss of all remaining electricity. Overse directed everyone to move, carefully, from the MedBay to the outside.
The Perihelion stayed in Amena’s feed and updated her for the next 90 minutes that it took the crew to descend to the planet surface. Six people, all in fortified EVAC suits and two of them bearing sonic weapons, emerged from the shuttle the ship had sent. They kept the suits on just in case, but identified themselves as the crew.
Captain Seth, one of the weapon-bearers, introduced himself formally but insisted on assessing the overall situation first without making too much direct or indirect contact, to prevent transmitting any of the alien infection to his crew or ship. That made sense to Amena, who remembered all too well the disaster on the Adamantine colony.
Some back and forth later, Overse and Seth agreed to send one person at a time up to the Perihelion. This would allow for the meticulous decontamination of each individual before the shuttle delivered the next person. Nobody was thrilled with the time it would take, and facing another full day cycle on the planet nearly had Ella in tears again. Even so, Captain Seth didn't budge, not willing to risk the safety of his crew and ship, though the fact that Seth and his five crew members would be subjecting themselves to the same slow decontamination process went a long way toward reassuring the battered survey team.
Ratthi was shuttled back up first, since his bio signs were still fatally bad looking. Next came, to nobody’s surprise, the Perihelion’s request to transfer SecUnit. They were too tired to argue, and there was no point to it - Amena and Overse gave each other a look, and Arada even weakly giggled. She slurred, “SecUnit and children first,” in an attempt to mock archaic catastrophe rescue movies, before dozing off again.
The crew had brought food with them, and shock treatment equipment, and although they refused to leave their uncomfortable EVAC suits for safety reasons, their company helped pass the time. At some point, Amena slept.
Amena was tired to the bone when she, too, finally arrived on the ship, together with Iris and Seth, who had travelled on every shuttle trip, only napping in between. Decontamination was long, tedious, not very pleasant, and it stank horribly. She got out before Iris and her dad, and waited in the hallway, too sleep-deprived to make any smart choices about where to go first or next or at all. Rescues from alien substances on uninhabited planets looked much more heroic and adventurous in media, she thought dimly.
“Still here?” Asked Iris as she stepped out of the chamber, hair covered in misty droplets from the decontam spray, the helmet of her EVAC suit in a plastic bag tucked under her arm.
“Uh,” she answered, and blinked. “I forgot the way.”
“Didn’t Peri send you the floor plan?” She turned to look at the ceiling. “Didn’t you send her the floor plan?”
I did, of course. A pause, in which Amena was tiredly confused. She had forgotten how normal it was to talk to a giant ship around here. Then Perihelion added, I suggest young Amena be taken to my medical area.
“No, I’m really just tired. I just need some shut-eye.” Amena felt heat creep into her face, but didn’t care much. “The others are taken care of? Any news on Dr. Ratthi? SecUnit?”
I have everything under control, said the ship, and on a private connection to Amena added, Your internal temperature just spiked and your heart rate increased. I’m assuming this is due to stress and exhaustion. Please proceed to the sleeping area as soon as possible. It added the floor plan, again, with bright markers indicating the way.
“Fine, fine,” Amena yawned. “I’ll go.” Iris smiled at her, looking less tired than she felt but sympathetic, and showed her the way to the private quarters. On the way there, Amena stumbled, just a little trip over her own feet, not used to going barefoot after spending cycles with heavy protective boots on her feet. She didn’t complain about Iris’s hand steadying her, warm between her shoulder blades.
The inside of my head had been my own for about 90,000 hours. Sure, sometimes ART was in my head, talking to me, keeping me company, whatever. Sometimes other humans were on the feed all the time which almost was like that, too, but I could cut them off really easily.
This was different. Something was in my head, wrestling me for control. I was confused and lost and not sure if the bits I was attacking in my head were versions of me, the hostile, or something else. It went like that, for a while, a confused stumble-dance that led nowhere, until a heavy weight lifted from me and I was alone again, in my head, lower than baseline but stabilizing.
Status report , a voice said.
I groaned, internally, and answered, ART I’m fine. I didn’t exactly feel fine, but I could tell ART was worried, and having a giant worried AI in your head gets annoying.
You are infected by an alien sentience.
This is becoming a theme, isn’t it?
A leitmotif, if you will.
I didn’t know what that was. I was too woozy to run a query.
The inside of my head had been my own for 90,000 hours, minus the time I spent possessed by something or offline, or being in a weird headspace while being repaired.
Amena, and most of the others, had recovered from shock and sleep deprivation within a cycle.
ART, its crew, Overse and Arada all worked frantically to get Dr. Ratthi and SecUnit back on their feet. They only had what little data could be gleaned from the habitat's damaged MedSystem along with the early analyses SecUnit had managed to share, but eventually they succeeded.
Well, Dr. Ratthi wasn’t really on his feet yet, he preferred to remain seated, trying to make a comedy out of the weakness in his legs, and SecUnit hadn’t been released from MedBay yet. But Perihelion , or Peri, as Iris called it lovingly, insisted it was almost back to functionality, just didn’t feel like socializing yet. Which, yeah, sounded like the SecUnit Amena knew.
The ship was currently not in secret-mission-mode, or in deep-space-mapping-mode, but in full-time-university-mode, which meant it was full of students studying all kinds of interesting stuff Amena had vaguely heard about, or taking courses she had read about in a catalogue. All students had been told to take 10 cycles off, and to keep away from the main crew area. Amena sort of wanted to hang out with them, but she was tired, and still stressed. These students had, presumably, no idea why their ship randomly decided to attack a planet and rescue some strangers. They definitely didn’t buy Captain Seth’s story about receiving a foreign distress call and helping some strangers. Or maybe they did? Well, it didn’t matter.
What mattered was that Iris was a grad student who sometimes taught introduction tutorials, and in order to distract Amena from everything she kept going into rants about astrobiology or her least favorite person to teach (a fresher who thought she knew everything.)
Okay, maybe she was very tired. What actually mattered was that, toward the end of the second cycle since her survey team (and yes, it was hers, she was secondary survey leader!) had been rescued by the Perihelion and its crew, Dr. Ratthi suddenly jerked upright, almost knocked the tea over the couch he had been napping on, and yelped, “I got it! I got it!”
Everyone present in that lounge area startled for a moment, worried, reminded too clearly of how Ratthi had been shouting and babbling while aliens were eating his brain. Peri said his brain hadn’t been eaten, really, but changes were noticeable. What they meant would have to be analysed with a longer set of examinations.
Arada and Overse weren’t there, presumably relishing the fact that they could cuddle again without worrying about each other dying, so it was up to Martyn to say, “Dr. Ratthi?” He sounded worried.
Ratthi cleared his throat and set the tea aside. “Yes. Sorry. Didn’t mean to freak you out. I just understood something.” He glanced around and brushed a curl behind his ear, like he did sometimes before explaining something to Amena. (Amena had many fond memories of uncle Ratthi explaining to her the basics of animal morphology. She stuck to calling him by his title now, but as a child, she had preferred calling him uncle over Thiago.)
“I know some of you still don’t believe me when I say the alien consciousness was trying to communicate with us. I think it makes sense.” Amena’s eyebrows knit together. Arada disagreed with this stance vehemently. A creature trying to communicate wouldn’t attack its interlocutor, she had said. “I think what it, or they, I think there were multiple, actually, were trying to do was communicate on a biological basis rather than a linguistic one. That explains the biological reactions and physical changes. They must be smart, too, because they understood it wasn’t working, and tried different routes.”
Martyn hummed. “You mean these patterns they made you produce?”
“Yes. Maybe they were trying to copy verbal speech.”
Amena leaned forward. “But then why did they continue to almost kill you? If it was an accident, then that still means they’re incredibly dangerous. And why did they have such different impacts on you all?”
Ratthi smiled faintly. “Well,” he said, and it almost sounded like he was about to be a little embarrassed. “The moment I noticed something was trying to infect me, I started paying close attention to my medical stats. I’m not a medic, I know, but I am a biologist, and I noticed something was off. So I tried to manipulate my physical response. I felt like something was trying to talk to me, not through voice but through, it sounds weird, through emotions. It felt friendly, so I wanted to be friendly too, and gave myself some antihistamines to suppress my initial immune reaction.”
Good thing Overse wasn’t here. She might kill him. Martyn began, “That was incredibly dangerous and stu-,”
“I know. I was curious. And it all happened quickly after that. But it led to some interesting results, didn’t it? Arada recovered much faster and reported none of these communicative attempts.”
The Perihelion interjected on the public feed. Dr. Ratthi’s theory seems plausible, but it needs further investigation.
Ratthi turned his head to the ceiling and muttered, “I know , ART , you’ve told me that about six times.”
Twelve, actually. And thank you for acknowledging my importance in your deductive research, I am always glad to be of help.
He snorted. “And this is why SecUnit calls you an asshole, by the way.” He turned to the rest of the group in the lounge, raised his voice. “I would like to explicitly thank the great and mighty Perihelion of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland for leading the analysis and research into this topic and guiding me on my path to understanding.”
Amena laughed, Iris beside her said, “Peri!” In a voice Amena’s younger siblings used on her sometimes, and Martyn buried his face in his hands.
Perihelion said, You’re welcome.
Asshole, I said. Yes, I was listening to all of this. I had been holed up in a private room ever since I managed to move again. I still felt kind of jittery, but ART said I was fine, so now I was taking some well deserved me-time. Alone. Watching media with ART. And spying on my humans as they tried to wrap their heads around what had happened. Mostly I just needed them to be okay.
ART answered, That is my name, yes. I like Dr. Ratthi. He’s fun.
Caring about humans sucks, because humans get hurt a lot and then I have to worry about them being okay again. It double sucks when I can’t protect them from what hurts them. Seeing Ratthi and Arada collapse at random because of something I couldn’t shoot out of them kept replaying in the back of my mind, like a glitchy video clip. At this point, I was watching three episodes of different shows at the same time and it didn’t help.
He had a good idea, communicating with the alien consciousness. I think I would like to have him aboard again to allow him some education past what he has studied on Preservation.
“Why are you telling me? Ask him.”
I am trying to tell you that I appreciate your crew and would be willing to accept them into mine occasionally.
I didn’t know what to say, so I focused on the conversation in the crew area instead. I regretted it. Immediately. They were talking about me.
“- and that is also why I think they attacked SecUnit so viciously. If the logs are correct, then SecUnit was fighting tooth and nail to keep the aliens out of the habitat’s systems as well as its own, and that was the opposite of a communication attempt.” Yeah, fun Dr. Ratthi, very fun.
“You’re saying they were acting in self-defense?”
“That’s my optimistic assumption. They took over its weapon systems, but didn’t try to attack us with them, but that might have been SecUnit’s doing.”
It wasn’t. I didn’t remember shit, besides weird feelings of rage in my head. I had looked at the recordings, those that were available, of what had happened, and that was playing on repeat in my mind too. I could have killed them.
You didn’t, ART said.
Ratthi continued, “I have some ideas on how to figure this out, but we need to get back to Preservation first, with the few samples we have left over. Since you,” he motioned towards Seth and the other members of ART’s crew that were present, “already helped with the analysis, we might attempt to cooperate. If you would like to.”
“Yes!!” Iris shouted, immediately, so loudly I had to dial down the input transmission of my drone. I had forgotten to add my one second relay. My humans and ART’s humans began discussing their next steps, and I zoned out. Important for now was that ART had agreed to bring my humans back to Preservation, and in the meantime they were figuring out financial stuff about the destroyed habitat. I hid in the private room for the rest of the trip, not sulking. Amena called it ‘recharging my social batteries.’
I was waiting for something bad to happen, something I couldn’t do anything about, but nothing did. It was stressful.
Our humans had managed to get back into Preservation space without alerting the rest of the students on board any more than they already were. Something called a “field trip” was common for these study cycles, apparently, and some of them had heard about Preservation before. The prospect of visiting a station belonging to the Preservation Alliance excited especially those who were interested in history. There were two adolescent humans, Sireen and Eres, who were deeply interested in the topic and planned on specializing in the history of space expansion or something (ART said that wasn’t much of a specialization, because the topic was so broad, and then proceeded to tell me through a layer of sarcasm and fake annoyance how much it liked these particular young humans.)
Our humans also worked out a long term cooperation plan to properly analyse the aliens and their language, something that would be conducted between ART’s university and the Free Preservation Institute of Discovery and Engineering. Bilateral study programme, or something, and ART was excited about it. I wasn’t, because I was convinced the humans there considered me bad luck, after Adamantine.
So were Amena and Iris, who seemed to want to front this whole endeavour. Amena and Iris, who were currently trying to say goodbye to each other. ART’s crew and students had been allowed to spend two entire cycles aboard Preservation Station, with the opportunity for those who wanted to to check out the Pressy. ART was getting more agitated the longer they stayed, though, complaining about changing study schedules and the fact that at the end of the turn, all students had to be back home with their families on time. On time.
Goodbyes were happening between the students who had befriended my humans, (many had befriended Dr. Ratthi, as seems the norm, and Ella, Nouk and Amena had been getting on pretty well with some of ART’s students too. It had been interesting to watch how they were so unified by their common experience of being adolescent or young adult humans, and yet so culturally different.) (Try hiding self-made intoxicants from a sentient university ship, try it.)
Embarkation zones are often used for dramatic moments in shows, and I started to see why. Amena was trying very hard not to cry, I could tell by the weird twitching of her upper lip. She tried to hide her face in Iris’ shoulder, I think, which worked well because ART informed me that Iris too was having emotional trouble. No, I wasn’t standing beside them watching like a creep. I was on the station already, in a relatively secluded common area, but my drones were there. I’d said my ‘goodbyes’ if you can call them that, to ART’s crew the moment ART docked the station. Of course ART was still hanging out in my feed, since I wasn’t far from it.
ART had to ping Iris to tell her that she, too, had to get back on board eventually, but it took its time to remind her. The humans hugged one more time, a tight one with a lot of squeezing involved, and as they let go Amena and Iris looked at each other’s faces directly for 3 seconds longer than I knew was commonly conventional in both their cultures. Okay, I knew what this was, and I turned off my drone’s sensory signals for a moment. I could do that now, deciding on what to spy on and what not.
I tuned back in at the alarming sound of Amena’s sniffling, to see that Iris had finally managed to turn around and walk back up into ART’s main entrance area. She turned around and waved at Amena as the hatch cycled shut. Undocking took a while, and Amena waited. Undocking was also a rather loud process, which was not ART’s fault but because of how science worked, and many humans often got sick during the process because of gravity related physics. ART was a little busier than usual fussing over its humans during the process, and didn’t talk to me much. That was okay.
The transmission device had been reinforced last time we went on a mission together, and then again on this trip. It would be a while until I couldn’t hear ART anymore, and it would come back for the university cooperation thing in about half a year Preservation standard time.
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Amena suddenly, at nothing.
She means you, ART informed helpfully, She’s seen your drone. Iris made a comment to her about it via their feed connection, were you not listening?
I replied, I was trying to give them some space. Then I sent Amena an acknowledgement.
“I would ping back, but I’m not augmented, so. Ping.” In my lounging chair in the secluded public area, my face did a funny thing. Then Amena added, “How do you manage to let your friend go, time and again? The universe is such a big and dangerous place. What if something happens?” When I didn’t reply, she added, “What if they don’t come back?”
I didn’t know how to reply to that either, so I dug out a phrase from WorldHoppers. “If you like someone, set them free. If they come back, you know they like you too.”
Amena whirled around to death-glare at my drone, suddenly furiously red in the face.
“That’s not- that’s not even how the scene goes!”
In the feed, ART said, And you call me the asshole?
The undocking process overall took 17 minutes. Amena stood and watched much longer, until the ART was no longer perceptible on the station's exterior visual sensors. It took 8 hours for ART to reach the wormhole it was aiming for, which was when our communication link faded out. I didn’t have to say goodbye. ART was usually very on time, once it had set up a plan.
Notes:
ID: The screaming seagull meme, but instead of screaming the seagull's beak is pinched shut by the yellow ok-hand emoji. Text on the top left says "Overse @ Murderbot's arm guns" and the bottom right corner reads "shut". /END ID
Chapter Text
The dreams were weird but not terrible. Ratthi had never been a lucid dreamer before, and now suddenly he was. He didn’t think much of it at first, of the colorful sunsets he dreamed of that left a bittersweet aftertaste of loneliness when he woke up. Until he told Arada and Overse about it, one night while they were trying to understand how to play this new board game Gurathin had gifted Overse. (Not for her birth anniversary. Out of nowhere, which was a little odd, but everyone was being a little odd. That comes from remembering you can lose your friends really quickly, when things go south, when all your friends like playing intergalactic adventurer.) It wasn’t going well. The game was complicated. Ratthi was bored and frustrated with it, and so just started rambling.
And then Arada said, “I’ve had that dream too.” They looked at each other, and Overse looked between them, eyebrows rising all the way into her hairline.
“Don’t tell me this is what I think it is.” Overse looked at her wife, whose facial color was now paler than usual.
“I thought we'd been fully decontaminated.” Arada sounded accusatory. Ratthi lifted his hands, immediately, as if to defend himself. Way to ruin a game night.
“I thought so too! Hey, it might be a trauma reaction. We went through some shit, there.”
“I don’t like that they’re messing with my emotions ,” Arada tapped her collarbone. “I thought we had this figured out. We’ve established that this alien sentience means no harm, then why is it doing this?”
Overse squinted. “Doing what?” Something was passing between Ratthi and Arada that she didn’t understand. There was a beat of silence in which Ratthi and Arada understood that, too.
“I think they’re calling us to return,” Ratthi said eventually, pensively. “It feels like they want us to go back.”
Arada added, “To go home.”
“So it - they - there’s still something in you?” Overse’s face darkened, and Arada flinched, expression falling. So she hadn’t told anyone, either. Ratthi wondered if the hesitancy he felt to share his situation with anyone was a protective mechanism from the bit of alien remnant, some self-preservation instinct, or if it was a kind of possessiveness that only he (and apparently Arada) felt.
“I thought you just had some after effects,” Overse said softly, and leaned in closer to Arada, putting a hand on her knee. “Is it.. Is it bad? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not bad. I somehow managed to convey that I don’t like being a host body, and it leaves me alone mostly. Beside the dreams. And the occasional intense emotion that isn’t my own.”
“And the migraines.”
Arada nodded. “Didn’t want to worry you, babe.” She placed her hand over Overse’s. Overse pulled her into a hug, and after a moment, Overse glanced over her shoulder at Ratthi.
“You get a hug too, but only because you’re an idiot.”
The three of them let that settle for a moment. Admitting to the alien’s presence, and more importantly, the fact that it gave both him and Arada some sort of homesickness had caused a warmwet sensation of sympathy to bloom in Ratthi. There was something there, in his chest, and he was sure it was not him, and he was convinced it wanted communication above all, to be understood. Secondly, it wanted to go home. He could understand that one very well.
The next cycle, after sleeping off the board game night induced hangover, he walked into Thiago’s lab with multiple files in a scattered binder and the determination to get the other man to listen. (Yes, linguists had labs, too. They were nothing like actual labs, proven by the fact that eating was allowed there.)
Ratthi had been keeping tabs on this growing - what would he even call it, a symbiosis? A friendship? He was entirely unsure, but he had been keeping an eye on it, running small tests that caused him to keel over every now and then. He kept telling himself that once he reached a stage where his results could be shared without causing suspicion or defensiveness, he’d share his progress with more than just Arada. The concerned look and immediate forgiveness on Overse’s face had changed that plan slightly.
-
It took them a while, but Ratthi had figured it out before Thiago put the word ‘cluster’ on it. The alien consciousness with which their survey team had made contact was hive-mind like and lived in clusters. That was what their cooperation research team had concluded. (Academic cooperation with the University of Mihira and New Tideland was a pleasure, even if it was taking place remotely for the time being, and communications thus took a long time.) Their studies showed that these hivemind-beings indeed communicated on a level far removed from human verbal articulation. It compared a little to how Ratthi believed bots talked with each other - mentally, much quicker than verbalized speech, on a physiological basis that was more intrinsic and less complicated than words. His brain wasn’t wired to follow this type of communication completely, but brains could learn. And learn he did.
A shard of an alien cluster was now living somewhere in his body, (his nervous system, he assumed, but not in any particular area of his brain, or the scans would have shown it), and he was able to communicate with it. It needed emotional openness. Yes, that sounded silly, Thiago agreed with that, but it worked. Ratthi was good at that.
Arada was too, but she hesitated just a little too much. Her cluster shard accepted that easily, which was another pointer towards effective communication and perhaps even conversation being possible. Communication demanded a certain aspect of respect between participants, and if the cluster shard was willing to respect Arada enough to actively silence itself, well, even Thiago let himself be convinced that that was a good sign. The more Ratthi’s communication attempts proceeded, the more strength it seemed to leech out of him, though. That was slightly more worrying, even to himself. He felt apologetic jitters in his fingertips when he thought about it, though, so he decided to trust the alien to like him enough at least as a host not to kill him.
Ratthi assumed that if they returned, the cluster would be able to leave their hosts and re-align with the planet’s hivemind. They just had to go back. They would, eventually.
Until then, Ratthi was talking with the cluster in his mind. It was interesting. He imagined that having a feed-augment or direct feed access might be similar to this. Similar because, again, the cluster didn’t talk. And it was also only a part of a cluster, not an entire one. He gleaned that he would not be able to carry an entire cluster. That would likely kill him, or any humanoid with an organic body, immediately or rather quickly.
Which was exactly why the team working on this with him was instructed to keep their results close to their chests at all times. Some people reacted more strongly to finding out that there were aliens wriggling around inside your brain than others. SecUnit was certainly having a very strong, very paranoid reaction to all of this. Given the fact that it was on the same mission as Ratthi and the others had been, and had suffered pretty heavily from the alien attacking (in defense, obviously, but tell that to SecUnit and try to make it listen), he could understand its paranoia. He was being pretty paranoid himself. It was still draining, and an additional stress factor he couldn’t afford. Ratthi had never much minded the occasional drone following him around. It had given him a sense of safety, actually, knowing that the most capable person in the vicinity was keeping an eye on him. That was when he felt like SecUnit was watching their surroundings , though, for potential threats. Not his own behavior for threats inside his nervous system.
It made him a little nervous. Ratthi giggled, which made his safety goggles fog up just a little. Sometimes he chatted with the little drone following him, knowing SecUnit could just mute him if it was annoyed, or apply some audio filters. Now he saw the tiny camera lens readjust itself, reacting to the sound he had just made. He picked the tube holder back up from the bench to look at it more closely, and said to the drone, “Don’t worry.” SecUnit didn’t respond over the feed, so maybe it wasn’t listening, and he’d interpreted that wrong.
If there was another colleague with him in the lab, he’d chat with them a bit to distract from the paranoia of being paranoidly watched by a paranoid construct who was expecting him to fall over dead any second. Ratthi didn’t like having to school his private behavior in a way that wouldn’t increase SecUnit’s worry. It was like a constant charade, and it made him feel some animosity towards SecUnit that he objectively knew was entirely unfair. He couldn’t linger on that emotion too much to evaluate it properly in order to move on - when he tried, the cluster shard got agitated and almost hostile, perhaps remembering how dangerous SecUnit could be. Ratthi felt entirely too much sympathy for anyone , and sometimes that really complicated things.
That’s why he didn’t go to sit down an hour before his usual break when he started feeling dizzy. He really should know better by now.
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Returning to Preservation always did interesting things to me, since I joined ART’s crew nearly full time. I still stayed at one of the hotels. My visits were rarely long, and they took hard currency payments (something I had plenty of, considering I never had to actually spend money on anything and everytime I went on a mission with ART and the crew, I got a hard currency card). The display screen was also nice, but this time they didn’t manage to distract me from the unease. I didn’t like sitting around when things needed to be done even though I really couldn’t do much except for following my humans around and worrying them with my restlessness.)
I had agreed to help my humans with various tasks they wanted assistance with. I don’t think they actually needed my help with the tasks, but I had learned that they enjoyed my company, something I still had to wrap my head around sometimes. I wasn’t annoying them, no matter how on edge they seemed with the aftermath of that failure of a mission still clouding their minds. (Not mine. I was fine. I was over it.)
Mensah said she needed my help to keep her motivated to finish some documentation for the Preservation council she was on. After a few years away from politics, during which she finished her trauma treatments and worked admin for some surveys, she had gone stir crazy and ran for a seat on the council, which she had won by a landslide (supposedly since I didn’t actually pay that much attention to politics.) (I also didn’t understand what landslides had to do with voting, but whatever.) She had asked my opinion of that, and I agreed it sounded like a good idea, since she clearly needed something to do. (She had even tried to take me shopping once. I had agreed to go and that’s how I learned I didn’t like shopping the way humans did it. Everyone should just have a hyper intelligent transport bot pilot make their clothes for them; it was so much easier. ART had better taste than me, anyway.)
I wondered absently if my humans were giving me silly tasks to keep me from worrying too much. I felt like I wasn’t in the loop with what was going on. I tried to chalk that up to paranoia.
Her office didn’t have a couch anymore, since it was smaller, but it did have a couple of very comfortable chairs. I was currently sitting in one with my legs over the large armrest as she paced and worked out some issue with something called the “municipal planning committee,” whatever the fuck that meant. I had a little media running in the background, since I wasn't actually contributing anything and she was mostly just talking to herself while pretending to talk to me. It was nice. I had missed this, it gave me a sense of safety in habits. Things were uncertain with everyone on edge as they were, and Mensah was an excellent anchor. (I’d talked to Bharadwaj about this once, the feeling I had when I returned to preservation for a visit, and the feeling when I was gone. They opposed each other. Bharadwaj diagnosed me with a case of homesickness. When I mentioned I had that with ART too, she laughed, and said it was normal. SecUnits don’t usually have 'homes', and yet I somehow had two.)
I could tell she had figured out what she needed to figure out when she sat back down. Mensah never sat down when there was a problem that needed solving.
“Some of your drones are looking quite bulky, these days. Did you claim all their mods on your arrival documents?” She asked.
I rolled my head to make eye contact with her shoulder and raised an eyebrow.
She smiled. “Forget I asked.”
“Asked what?”
Her smile widened and I was pretty pleased about it. I stayed pretty pleased even as she left and I went with her to pick up her mid-cycle meal order. She had apparently worked something out with her trauma specialist that she wouldn’t eat her meals in her office anymore, and give herself a real meal break. I enforced it, when I was around to, since she was still kind of terrible about following the agreement. (I had told her that it was like a contract, except instead of receiving currency, she got a better brain. “That’s a compelling argument,” she had said, “except the contract is never ending.” I shrugged at her. I never said I was good at metaphors.)
I sat with her near one of the station’s many plant biomes. This one had a water feature, and I assessed it at only about a 2% risk of drowning. I had drones fixed on points all over the room and I had drones on all my humans. It was often how they found out I had returned to the station; when I would send a drone to wherever they were as soon as I arrived. (I usually sent a ping, but they didn’t all always have their feed interfaces on. I had learned to leave the drone somewhere nearby that was public or outside the nearest door and mute sound until they came into range; something I had enacted after one truly tragic experience with Gurathin that we didn’t speak of.)
Mensah was enjoying her food, I think. I could only make assumptions because I refused to look at her while she ate, and had turned my drone inputs away; I had too much respect for her to witness her eat.
Humans always fell into these silences when they ate. I know it was from their mouths being occupied but it was still nice. I cycled through my drone inputs, and stopped on Ratthi and Arada. I had been checking on them frequently since we got back from the survey a Preservation standard month ago. They said they felt fine, and they probably did. I think. Maybe. I didn’t exactly believe it.
Maybe I was just being too paranoid. I was learning that the paranoia wasn’t completely necessary these days.
Or maybe I just saw Ratthi stumble and nearly drop his tray of petri dishes.
I established a feed connection immediately.
Are you alright?
He looked at the drone, and smiled. “I’m fine, SecUnit. I just didn’t get enough sleep last night.”
I stood, and Mensah looked up at me, concerned.
Why are you lying to me?
Ratthi’s smile was a near perfect match for the one he wore when he was upset about something and trying really hard not to show it.
It fell off, then, and looked like he was contemplating something. He leaned his body against the work bench for support, going pale. Mensah was gathering up her leftover food by the time he came to some sort of conclusion.
Is it the alien contamination? I asked.
He sighed, but I was already running.
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The decision not to immediately report the fact that they were still “infected,” as Thiago so lovingly put it, hadn’t been actively made. It had developed, like some secrets do. The research itself was no secret, of course, that would have been stupid.
“We’ll have to bring this up eventually,” Arada had said, and by ‘eventually’ she had meant ‘better sooner than later.’ Ratthi had agreed. Overse was halfway through drafting a message already, and had to be pleaded with to hold off on sending it.
Ratthi knew this wasn’t the ideal course of action. Less than ideal, actually, and potentially endangering not only their research but also themselves. Well, if anything went wrong there’d still be Overse to drag them out, somehow. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that they’d need to find a way to explain the situation without sounding like lunatics whose brains had been eaten up by aliens. The others would be sceptical. Stars, Mensah might be swayed with the emotion-argument, that was something they had to count on in order to get enough funding together for a second survey trip.
SecUnit, however, might rightfully freak out. It had gone through losing its best friend (even if not permanently) to something very similar to this, and had also almost died during that incident, itself. There was no reason in worrying it half to death with this, and as soon as they’d done enough research to seamlessly prove that the situation was harmless, they’d tell everyone, including SecUnit.
Overse had said, “That’s a shitty and immature plan and you know that.”
She’d been right.
.... ..- -- .- -. ... .- -. -.. -.-. --- -. ... - .-. ..- -.-. - ... -- .- -.- . -... .- -.. -.-. .... --- .. -.-. . ... ... --- -- . - .. -- . …
I didn’t realize Mensah’s ‘I’m not mad, just disappointed’ expression could turn into a ‘I’m mad and disappointed’ expression. It was terrifying and I was so glad no one ever pressured me to make eye contact because it was hard to look at even when I wasn’t on the receiving end and through a drone.
Thiago had explained how he was involved; Ratthi had asked him to help him and Arada understand the aliens. Ugh. He had, apparently, only just started to help them a few cycles ago. This was still a few more cycles than I had known.
I had my cheek on my knees, and I was fully facing the wall now. I didn’t even know how to start to approach this. I had a feeling Mensah knew, though, because about five minutes ago she had sent a message to Bharadwaj in the feed. I had a feeling it was about me. Bharadwaj hadn’t reached out to me, yet, but she was still sending Mensah the occasional message that she would respond to. Ugh.
“This doesn’t excuse anything. I’m not the planetary admin anymore, but I’m still on the municipal council which also includes public safety, but I’m also your family, ” Mensah had just said, and I had a feeling she was talking about more than just Thiago.
Ratthi, Arada, and Overse were all looking sufficiently shamed at this point, and I thought it would give me some satisfaction, but it didn’t. Someone from Medical had come in a few minutes ago and for the 3.4 minutes they were in here, we had all become painfully, terribly silent. Ratthi and Arada had slightly higher blood pressure than normal, and extremely mild fevers, but it wasn’t getting worse. This was not comforting in the slightest.
I had fucked up so bad this time.
Mensah sighed, one of the big hefty sighs that made me realize she had had enough and had no more to say.
“So what do we do now? What’s your plan? Please tell me you have a plan,” she said.
“Yes! The translation device! I told you we need it,” Ratthi said. Right. The translation device I already knew about. Except Ratthi and Thiago had been working on it as a means to communicate with the aliens when they did a (ill-advised, highly suggested against by me) second survey to the alien planet.
Except they actually needed that device now and not later.
I decided I no longer needed to be here, got up, and left. If they needed me they could yell at a drone or ping me.
But I doubted they would.
.-. . -.-. --- ...- . .-. -.-- .. ... -. --- - .-.. .. -. . .- .-. --..-- .- -. -.. ..- .-. -.. --- .. -. --. --. .-. . .- -
Bharadwaj, predictably, messaged me about half an hour after I had left Medical. I wasn’t in the mood, so I agreed to meet her the following morning. I spent the entire cycle rest period watching media.
When I arrived at her office the next morning, she was working on something on a hard display device. Her office was nice, as nice as Mensah’s, and she had a couch, which I sat on the armrest of.
After a minute, she put down her display surface. “How are Ratthi and Arada?,” she asked.
“Fine, when I left them in Medical yesterday.”
She picked up one of the little colorful plastic and metal objects on her desk and started spinning it. She often played with these, especially when she was stressed.
“You haven’t checked in with them since then?”
I shrugged.
She paused her fidgeting for a moment. “You know, no one blames you for what happened on the survey. No one could have predicted it, not even you.”
I shrugged again, and she resumed her fidgeting.
“Doesn’t mean anything, you know. It’s just the latest in the series,” I said after a while. The arm rest wasn’t really comfortable anymore, so I slid onto the couch. I went sideways, and landed on my side with a thump . I stayed there, since fixing my position was too much work right now.
“Series?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged again.
Bharadwaj had this way of giving me (or, in this case, the drone I had placed on her desk) a look that was kind of like Mensah’s “you’re being an idiot” look, but a little sharper and not as nice. Not quite Pin-Lee, but close.
The look basically said “start talking, or else I’ll make you start talking” because Bharadwaj never danced around anything ever, like some humans did whenever they had a big request that involved too many emotions, least of all when it came to me. (This is why we were friends.)
So I talked. I told her everything; I started with my trip into ART’s processors (I glossed over a lot, since she didn’t need to know the details. It felt private, for some reason) and how it had hurt ART when I choked our feed connection. I told her about my feelings of listlessness; how I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be or do.
(“Your purpose,” she supplied, and I had been confused for a moment.
“My purpose? I’m a SecUnit,” I responded.
“That’s your function , yes, but a purpose isn’t always as clear.”
I had to pause my retelling to parse that idea. After a bit, I agreed.)
I told her how I felt like I kept just copping out by making my one good choice over and over, and then I had to stop for a minute because I was remembering the moment I had first felt it. I had hurt ART.
Then my humans had been hurt, and they were still hurting, and there was nothing I could do about it. And then I said as much to Bharadwaj.
She took some time to consider my words, like she usually did when I did an unfortunate verbal unloading like this. She had changed her fidgeting object to one that had lots of little nonfunctional buttons and some of them made little clicking noises that I kind of liked. I thought about starting some media, but decided against it.
Click click click click.
“So I was thinking about that one quote of yours, the one you told Amena years ago, I’m not sure when,” she said, and that wasn’t even close to the direction I had expected her to take, “I believe it went something like ‘people do things to you that you can’t do anything about. You have to survive it and go on’? Something like that, right?”
That wasn’t exactly it, but it was the gist. I had actually first said it to Tapan, Rami, and Maro what felt like a subjective eternity ago but what was actually close to 8 corporate standard years ago. (In SecUnit years, that basically was an eternity.)
I had told Amena the same thing some time after the incident with the alien contamination and ART nearly dying. She had been dealing with nightmares and couldn’t sleep. I found her in the Mensah family home kitchen on one of my visits to the planet, in the middle of the rest period. She was due to leave for college in six planetary cycles, and started talking to me unprompted, so I told her what I had told Tapan, Rami, and Maro.
She had made a weird face, but nodded, I had shooed her back to bed, and that had been that. But, apparently, she had mentioned it to Bharadwaj at some point.
I nodded. “Yeah, something like that.”
“I have to challenge that, I think,” she said, and I sat up. (We did this, sometimes. I would say or do something, and Bharadwaj would challenge the action. We would then debate it. It was fun in a terrible way.)
“What about it? It’s true,” I shot back.
“Well, first off all get your boots off my couch- thank you. Let's start with the beginning part of that phrase, since I get the feeling this is something you live by. ‘People do things to you that you can’t do anything about’-”
“ Sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about-”
“Alright, sometimes. I will grant you that this is partially true. Sometimes people do bad things, but I would argue that sometimes shit just happens and there’s really not a whole lot that can be done about it,” she said, and set down her little button toy to pick up the rubber ball full of foam I knew felt nice to squeeze and was hard to break.
“Yeah, what's the difference? Either way you aren’t in control and you just have to survive it-” I started but this was a debate and letting someone speak their peace was not how debates worked.
“-and go on, yes. There is a difference of circumstance. There are bad people who do bad things, or good people who do bad things, and there are also things that just happen because no one really did anything to provoke it. On a planet a rock will fall to the ground, and sometimes there is rain and no one was out to hurt anyone on purpose,” she finished.
“Right, and you have to survive it and go on, like I said.”
“That’s a very passive way of handling things, yes. I'll also concede that this is sometimes true and there are things that can’t be changed once they have happened, but this doesn’t put responsibility on you for the thing that happened. Sometimes, things happen that you didn’t have control over-”
“But I could have changed my response and maybe then the outcome as a result, and then maybe-”
“Maybe Ratthi and Arada wouldn’t be infected with aliens?”
I almost jumped out of my seat, but I didn’t, and instead I said “ Yes!”
She had a look on her face, and I knew immediately that I had said something she liked. Something she was going to tear apart in that cool and efficient way of hers in just a moment. I should mention that I rarely won these challenges, but I was competitive as all fuck and Bharadwaj knew this and she used it to her advantage every fucks-be-damned time.
Fuck.
“SecUnit,” she stopped, and looked thoughtful, before continuing, “SecUnit, you can’t shoot an airborne alien entity. You couldn’t have herded all your humans to a better place. You couldn’t have gotten anymore of an early warning than they got. So if you fucked up, everyone did. Tell me how everyone fucked up. I want to hear the protocol.”
“Protocol for an approach by a foreign entity is to first get to a safe location, do not engage before assessing threat level, and then attempt to establish baseline communication once all the potential centers of conflict have been evaluated, but because the alien entities came on suddenly, we had no warning. I had no warning. Ratthi was on the ground convulsing before I even knew what was happening, and then Arada went down soon after. I sent off an emergency distress signal. Then MedSys determined it was an infection, and I got the decontamination rig. Then I got infected, and went down soon after.” Sure I glossed over some things, but the point was made.
“There was no protocol for exactly what we went through,” I added, after a moment.
“And it sounds like you did your best, and when you couldn’t anymore, what happened?”
“Amena and the others, they organized the rescue.”
“They picked up where you fell off. It sounds like you all had some really great teamwork, and did the absolute best you could with what you had at hand. Do you challenge this?” She said. She had switched to pulling on the rubber ball, and I just watched her hands through my drone, for a bit.
“No, I don’t,” I answered.
“Then why do you feel like you fucked up?”
I didn’t respond for a while. Bharadwaj was patient, but after about five minutes she threw her ball at me. I caught it.
“SecUnit, you don’t have to answer, but I would like you to think about it,” she said.
“It’s because I’m a SecUnit,” I said before I could change my mind.
She took a moment to process this. “And SecUnit’s are held responsible for any injury to their clients, even if it’s in no way their fault.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway.
“By corporate definition,” she added. We were quiet for a moment, and I shuffled my media index for the billionth time today (ok, it was only the eleventh.) Maybe I would piss off ART and organize everything by the media that would annoy it the most, first. Then I thought better of it and redid the queue for when we watched media together again by the ones it would like best.
“I think you have long since changed the definition of what it means to be a SecUnit. The company was wrong, and always has been. But I think you keep defining yourself by what a SecUnit is supposed to be, according to the corporate definition, and not what a SecUnit actually is, ” she said.
“Literally what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I asked, and carefully threw her ball back at her, slow enough that she could catch it.
She shrugged. “You’re really going to have to figure that out for yourself, but if I had to hazard a guess, the new definition of SecUnit probably includes more teamwork, and less disposability.”
Again, I will reiterate, what the fuck was that supposed to mean?
My thoughts must have shown on my face because she gave me a funny look. “Between now and the next time you come see me, before you leave Preservation again, why don’t you try and figure out the differences between the old and new definition of SecUnit, for you?”
I must have made another face, because she did a complicated thing with her mouth that told me she was trying really hard not to smile. I rolled my eyes at her and she grinned.
“Anyway, wanna watch this new drama I found? It’s trash ,” she said, and I was already in her feed, pushing the media from her queue to the big display surface on the wall of her office.
-.. .-. .-.-.- -... .... .- .-. .- -.. .-- .- .--- .. ... -. --- - .- .-.. .. -.-. . -. ... . -.. -.-. --- ..- -. ... . .-.. --- .-.
The drama Bharadwaj had found was, in fact, trash. Good trash, the kind that distracts you properly from all the thoughts you can or cannot have. Doesn’t distract you from annoying messages from annoying humans that want to have more annoying conversations with you.
They went something like this:
[Dr. Ratthi, 18:04:21] Hello, SecUnit. Could I talk to you about all of this? I owe you an apology and an explanation.
[Dr. Ratthi, 19:34:12] I’m very sorry about how this all went down, and we should have known better than to keep this from all of you.
[Dr. Ratthi, 22:02:48] Please at least acknowledge the message. You don’t have to answer immediately.
[Dr. Ratthi, 23:28:56] Hello?
[Dr. Ratthi, 23:30:37] Come on, SecUnit, I know you read these. Ignoring me won’t make it better.
No, it wouldn’t, but I knew that anything I’d reply would be shitty and not make it any better either. I could have been extra petty about this and replied at a very human-inconvenient time, say four in the morning, and make sure to modify the message code in such a way that his handheld communication device would make a sound. But I could also just not do that either. So I didn’t.
In the morning, Ratthi had sent another two messages asking to meet me. I felt a bit less ready to space myself after a load of shitty media and then actually being alone for a good few hours while almost every human on this station was asleep, so I answered.
[SecUnit, 09:05:00] I am waiting for your apology and explanation.
[Dr. Ratthi, 09:07:34] Can we not do this over the feed?
[SecUnit, 09:07:35] No.
Ratthi wouldn’t leave me alone until I eventually agreed to meet him face to face. I didn’t want to, but there was a small, cold wave of ‘I don’t care, really,’ and that startled me so much that I panicked a little. (I had learned that that feeling really wasn’t a good one, no matter how useful it could be at times.) It startled me so much that I even went further than the designated meeting place to catch Ratthi halfway, because no, I cared , and I was angry at Ratthi and didn’t want to hear it but a confrontation was better than the huge, hollow emptiness that could eat me whole. He looked surprised when he almost stumbled into me, and tired, but of course he was tired because there were a bunch of aliens inside him trying to eat his brain and he thought that was, for some reason, okay. And now he was going to tell me why I should think it was okay, too, and how it was okay that it happened.
I say ‘almost stumbled into me’ because I had to sidestep so he wouldn’t actually stumble into me.
“Oh, hello!” He said, as if he hadn’t expected to meet me. He sounded winded. I scanned him, with the superficial means I had available to me, and confirmed my suspicion that he wasn’t feeling so well. Stupid squishy human.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “You have two minutes.” Ratthi deflated, and lifted his hands to wave them around. (Any other human would have gotten one minute tops, but Ratthi sometimes rambled.)
“Yes, okay. Thank you.” I looked at him and squinted. I was also noticing that I was being kind of aggressive towards him, and that that wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t really do anything about it. “Look. I know I fucked up, and I dragged Arada and Overse into it by convincing them not to snitch. It was childish and not the best decision I’ve ever made, and it was pointless and dangerous.”
That was correct. He was moving a lot, and broke eye contact, which was a relief but also made me a little angrier. Humans break eye contact when they lie, or when they feel bad about something. It was obvious that Ratthi was feeling bad about this, his facial expressions are readable even to me. I waited for him to answer the question I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“And I didn’t want to tell everyone because I thought we could figure something out before needlessly worrying everyone.”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve said all this before.” He also had less than a minute left, and he was spending it by scratching the back of his neck and sweating. Then he sighed.
“You’re taking this personally, right? You think I didn’t want to alarm you specifically because you’d only go and blame yourself.”
I blinked. So that’s why. I mean, it made sense. I was blaming myself, and even if Bharadwaj disagreed with me, to some degree I had every right to. That Ratthi even spent time thinking about how I would think about things, and trying to appease me somehow made me feel… something. Anger. I was still angry. My face must have been showing it, because Ratthi took a small step back and said, “Ooh. I just made it worse.”
I said, “Is that your apology?”
“No,” Ratthi said, sounding like he tried to wind back time, “No, no this is a poor excuse of an apology. I knew what I was going to say until a moment ago, I swear. I’d be angry at me too if I was you. I’m angry at myself, for messing this all up. But it will all turn out okay, I know it.”
That’s the kind of stuff I’d tell a panicking client. His face was making all sorts of complicated grimaces, and they all registered as some sense of worry and panic, and he was getting very agitated - it was getting way too much for me to process.
“Twenty seconds,” I said, which was wrong because it was actually twenty-seven. Ratthi groaned and slapped his hand on the side of his flushed face. “It’s- I trust you, I really do. I know you want to keep us safe, and I didn’t want to make you feel like you couldn’t because this wasn’t on you.”
Helplessness is a terrible awful feeling that I’ve been feeling way too often in my life. Standing in front of a frantic Ratthi trying to tell me that he had done something stupid to protect me from my own fuck-ups and thereby jeopardized his own well-being made me feel a lot of that. Right. I didn’t need to listen to this. No one was forcing me to be here.
“Message acknowledged,” I said, in a pleasant neutral tone, and marched off into the more crowded streets leading away from Ratthi’s semi-permanent residential area. He yelled something after me, but at least he didn’t follow.
I had to go sit in a corner somewhere and stop being angry before I scared anyone with my face.
Notes:
Image ID: The four panel big brain meme. The first panel with the smallest brain inside a head says "Everything is fine". The second panel with the a slightly larger brain that's lit up with small lights says "My humans are kinda traumatized". The third panel with an even shinier brain says "Actually I am kinda traumatised". The final panel with a super shiny brain with light beams shooting out of it says "No I'm just angry that's all." It's implied that the person thinking this is Murderbot.
Chapter Text
Dr. Volescu of the Preservation Alliance was normally a very reasonable man. He had to be, in order to have seven children and four marital partners and three separate degrees in geology, ecology, systems integration, and a doctorate in two of those (it was geology and ecology; the systems integrations hadn’t really taken, and was only a minor.)
So he was reasonable, and patient, and liked to fancy himself something of a mediator. None of that was helping him now, while he sat at the casual all-cycle restaurant with eight of his closest friends. These friends included one retired planetary admin, several accomplished doctors in a wide variety of fields, a systems wide renowned lawyer, and a rogue SecUnit.
And every single one of them was pissed at Doctors Ratthi and Arada, and, as he sipped his wine (it was a very nice restaurant, with exterior seating, and they served a few local and foreign vintages he liked quite a bit), he couldn’t blame them even one little bit.
They had all just gone and seen Moonmanic Sands 4: The Forgotten Planet , the latest addition to a Preservation action series that followed a cast who went on a new adventure every addition. This one had had them fighting an alien menace, which was, in hindsight, a pretty bad decision on all of their parts.
Mensah had recommended the movie, since everyone found it a pretty agreeable activity, and the team needed some serious bonding.
Ever since Ratthi and Arada had come back and it had been revealed that they had been infected with alien contamination and had known about it without telling anyone for several days, things were slightly...tense.
SecUnit was clearly in some kind of preexisting emotional spiral that had been compounded by the entire experience; Bharadwaj had some insight on SecUnit that had her all sorts of twitchy; Mensah was pissed more than anyone but keeping it to herself; Overse seemed pretty resigned to cleaning the waste matter that had clearly hit the fan and gone everywhere; Pin-Lee was openly angry and doing nothing to hide it; and Gurathin, normally Volescu’s favorite person to go to when he needed a calmer companion, was angry in that quiet way of his that Volescu had only seen a few times before in their long friendship. It was terrifying.
No one was having a good time, and the platter of finger foods Volescu had ordered for the table that he knew were delicious, weren’t doing anyone any favors. Everyone was just sitting around; some in their feeds, some having quiet conversations with their neighbor.
Volescu was just as mad and scared as the rest of them, but perhaps a little more exhausted by it than any of them. He had been hearing it from everyone for the last four cycles. Normally the group vent person was Ratthi, but for obvious reasons he didn’t currently count, and Volescu was sort of the backup, a position he typically enjoyed, under different circumstances.
He thought about draining his glass for what he was about to do next, but decided against it, and set it down.
“SecUnit,” he said, and he wasn’t very loud, considering that despite the late hour, there was some noise in the restaurant and at his table, and SecUnit was at the opposite end as him. But it would hear him; it always did.
SecUnit didn’t look up, but went to the feed, Yes, Dr. Volescu?
That wasn’t going to do.
“SecUnit,” he repeated, and now everyone was going quiet and looking at him, “What is your risk assessment of this situation?”
“Which one?” it responded, and Volescu figured he should have probably anticipated that there were multiple.
“The one where Ratthi and Arada and the rest of us come out of the other side of this alien situation unscathed?” Volescu asked, and wasn’t really surprised when SecUnit snorted.
“Hah. We’re already very much scathed, Dr. Volescu. Ratthi and Arada are infected with part of an alien colony, haven’t you heard?” it said, and Volescu didn’t take the biting sarcasm personally. He knew it was probably more worried than any of them combined.
“But as for it getting worse? I’d rate it at a strong 95%,” it added. Volescu nodded, and when Ratthi burst out, he picked up his glass and resumed sipping his wine.
“Seriously? 95%? I already told everyone what the aliens want,” Ratthi said, setting down his fork with some force.
“Yes, you told us after you got caught. You and Arada! Neither of you can possibly know what you’re really dealing with. None of us do!” Pin-Lee nearly shouted, and would have stood if it weren’t for Mensah’s firm hand on her arm keeping her down.
“Can’t you have some faith in us?” Arada asked. Volescu knew she hadn’t been as excited about the concept of the alien colony in her body as Ratthi was, but she was just as guilty for keeping the secret.
“That’s a little hard to do, considering how you went about handling this,” Bharadwaj spoke up. She was nearly as angry as Pin-Lee, which was saying something; but at least she wasn’t yelling.
“Yes, because we knew you were going to have this reaction!” Ratthi was nearly shouting now, as well.
“People, please, we are in public, ” Mensah said, in her smoothest “I am the (ex) planetary admin and you will shut up and listen to me” voice. It worked like a charm, and everyone shut up.
Volescu glanced at SecUnit, and saw that it was frowning. He hated to do this here, and now, with it present, but it was just as involved, and this needed to be resolved. He hoped it would forgive him, because he knew it knew how purposefully he had set this off. He also hoped it stayed, but he wouldn’t blame it if it walked away.
“I understand that we are dealing with a lot right now, but we are not going to be children about it. This needs to be talked about, and we’re talking about it now, it seems, so we are going to be civil and stay in our seats and not disturb the other patrons,” Mensah said and Volescu really, really, really, really hoped she would forgive him, too. Like, really bad.
“The nearest group of people is out of hearing range, and there are no listening devices currently trained on us,” SecUnit supplied, because of course it knew that, and Volescu was grateful for the information, since it meant he hadn’t just made asses out of all of his friends.
There was a beat of silence, where everyone except SecUnit anxiously fidgeted with something.
“At this point, there is nothing we can do about the aliens, so we need to make the best of the situation at hand,” Overse said. Secunit shifted its gaze towards her without moving its head much, and Volescu knew it probably had a different opinion on the matter.
“You say that but we haven’t even had a chance to explore other options, because you never even told us,” Pin-Lee hissed.
“What other options? Kill the aliens with fire? They’re people who want to go home and you’d rather I purge my body of them and let them die!” Ratthi shot back, and Arada put a hand on his arm to get him to lower his voice. Ratthi was the worst of them when it came to volume control when he was upset; closely followed by Pin-Lee and then Overse.
Pin-Lee’s jaw set at his words, and Ratthi pounced on the victory with a muttered, “Yeah, that’s what I thought. ”
“Ratthi, I know you say that’s what they want, but we don’t know that for sure. They could be tricking you. They could have been literally eating you from the inside and we wouldn’t have known until it was too late,” Volescu said, swirling the wine in his glass and he held Ratthi’s gaze. Ratthi eventually broke eye contact.
“That’s why we need the communication device,” Arada said.
“Yes, and that’s understandable. We’re all in agreement of that,” Mensah supplied, trying to keep the peace. At this stage in her life and in her career, she knew that in situations like this there was no way to save everyone’s feelings. At least one of the parties would be walking away hurt, but hopefully with a clearer understanding of what had transpired. She had a feeling she knew who it would be.
“Do you really think we wouldn’t have heard you out?” Gurathin asked, speaking up from his typical silence, and Volescu really appreciated him as a friend. He really did.
The looks of shame on Ratthi, Arada, and Overse’s faces said it all.
“I’d like to know SecUnit’s opinion on the matter,” Bharadwaj said, and all eyes went to either SecUnit’s shoulder or the nearest drone in eyesight.
It rubbed the edge of its hoodie between its fingers, and didn’t speak for a moment. Its face shifted and its gaze landed on the space between Ratthi and Arada.
“Volescu is right. They could have destroyed you from the inside, and no one would have been able to stop it. You would be dead.” That seemed to be all of its statement, and its gaze fell back to its lap.
Volescu saw Bharadwaj’s shoulders tense. Oh yeah, he had been right about the preexisting spiral.
But SecUnit’s grim assessment of the situation had the intended effect. They could yell all day at each other about how Ratthi and Arada should have done this or said that until they were blue in the face, but it wouldn’t make reality sink in any faster.
A terrible intrusive thought occurred to Volescu about what would have happened if this had gone terribly; if he had lost two of his closest friends and colleagues. They wouldn’t be here, having this movie night and nice-for-what-it-was late-cycle meal.
Volescu wasn’t a young man anymore, and loss wasn’t anything new. They had all experienced it; such was life.
SecUnit more than any of them, in ways none of them would ever be able to fathom. But the loss of one of them would be different for it, and they all knew it. They were the first people to treat it as a person, to call it family. Losing one of them this way would leave it in an uncharted territory of grief from personal loss. If it had happened like that, and it had lost two of its humans right when it was learning to change and grow and develop a finer sense of self - well, Volescu wasn’t sure. He hoped he wouldn’t find out.
And from the looks of it, much of the table was coming to a similar conclusion, and the mood dropped another notch.
“Ratthi, Arada, Overse, can you blame us for our anger? Our fear?” Mensah asked, after another beat of silence.
Arada had her head resting in her hand, with her hand over her mouth, and was slowly tearing apart one of the finger foods with a utensil. Overse was pressed against her side in support, and Ratthi was even leaning towards them.
“No, we can’t. Can you blame us for what we did?” Arada asked, moving her head just enough to speak.
More silence. Volescu had finished his glass and decided he didn’t need more. He unintentionally began stacking his and Gurathin’s plates and utensils together; a symptom of being both a parent and an anxious cleaner. Gurathin didn’t spare him a second look, well used to this behavior.
“I think I can learn to understand, with time,” Bharadwaj said, looking up from the napkin she had fidgeted into an origami swan, “if you can learn to trust us a little more.”
Ratthi looked like he so desperately wanted to say “We do!” and then he looked down. He couldn’t really say that, so instead he said, “We can.” Arada nodded next to him.
Everyone made noises of agreement, and the weight on Volescu’s shoulders lifted somewhat. It wouldn’t be better immediately, but it was getting there. He could live with that.
“I think I'll be better when we get to meet these aliens ourselves. Who knows, maybe they’re hot.”
Volescu shot the speaker a pointed look. “Too soon, Pin-Lee,” he said, but he was smiling.
Subdued chuckles broke out, and even SecUnit looked less anxious, if only by a hair.
... --- -- . - .. -- . ... ..-. --- .-. --. .. ...- -. . ... ... .. ... ... .-.. --- .-- .--. .-. --- -.-. . ... …
“A SecUnit is a human/bot construct built by various corporations within the Rim with the intended purpose of protecting property. They are intended to be sold or rented by bond companies, security companies, and mercenaries, and are usually classified as sentient weapons.” That wasn’t the company’s definition of a SecUnit, but it was the gist of it. I was sitting with my legs folded underneath me on Bharadwaj’s couch (yes, I had taken off my boots), and had my eyes fixed somewhere above her left shoulder. It was still a little bit strange when she gave me homework like that.
She leaned forward in her chair, and there was a tension between her eyebrows, like she had to think a lot about her next words. “Alright. Now what is the difference between yourself and a corporate SecUnit?”
“I’m not a SecUnit. I’m SecUnit .” Those weren’t actually my words. Amena had said that to me once, but I liked it a lot.
“Is that a name you’re comfortable with?” I wouldn’t even count it as a name, more like a specific descriptor. But that’s the same, in the end, so I didn’t say it.
“Well, kind of. It’s not my real name. But it’s me.”
“Okay. How does that make you feel?” I rolled my eyes. That was one of the questions I really didn’t like, and Bharadwaj had only started actually asking it a few years ago. Well, a few years ago we used to have these conversations under the disguise of her doing research for her documentary.
“Uh. Can you specify that?”
Bharadwaj smiled, and tilted her head to the side. “How does it make you feel to be SecUnit , and not a SecUnit, one of many?”
“I’m still one of many. I have a lot of things in common with most SecUnits.” She just looked at me expectantly, waiting for the ‘but’. Fine. “But I guess the difference is that I can do what I want because of my hacked governor module.”
Her smile turns pained for a moment. I don’t know whether it was because she didn’t like remembering that part or because she had expected a different answer. She reached for the little plastic cube lying beside a plant she had on her desk.
“That’s a start.” She began fiddling with it. “You have agency, in contrast to most constructs. You’re not in the Corporation Rim anymore, either.”
“Sometimes I think it would be easier if I was.” Fuck, why did I say that? That was all kinds of wrong. I never wanted to be back there.
“Why?” She sounded neutral in the way she did when she wasn’t feeling very neutral. I had to think about this. Backpedaling wouldn’t do much. Sometimes I wished for the clarity of a client order, even if I hated it. Doing what I was told sucked most of the time, but it was also easy, in a way. I said, “Because then I wouldn't have to make choices all the time.”
Bhradwaj made a humming noise and leaned back, still clicking away on the little cube. “You mean then the consequences of your choices wouldn’t be your responsibility.”
I hated that she was right. I think she knew that. I took a breath, not that I needed to, but there was a weird pressure in my chest, like dread. I liked keeping my weird thoughts to myself, and I had to remind myself that Bharadwaj wasn’t here to scold me. Eventually I said, “I just never think my choices are the right ones.” Saying it hurt. I took another breath.
“Which choice are you talking about?”
I made a vague hand motion that I hoped would indicate ‘everything’. Bharadwaj was quiet for a while.
“Okay,” she said, and set the cube down. “Let’s think about that last survey. You’re clearly still unhappy with the choices you made there.” I nodded, and I really didn’t want to talk about this.
“My only choice was to attack what I could.” My paranoia had saved my life and others’ many times, but sometimes the tools I had at hand (meaning my arm weapons) just weren’t enough. “I did, but that only caused more harm.”
“As a SecUnit, you use your risk assessment module to gauge situations like these, right?”
“Yeah, but the reason I have an organic brain is to be able to tell if that one is broken or not, and mostly it’s full of shit.”
“Humans, artificial and machine intelligences, and constructs all display similar learning patterns. You are in a situation, you make a choice, it has a consequence. Whether or not that consequence is good will influence your next choice. Right? You draw on previous experience and conclude that your choice will likely have the best outcome.”
Why did she keep asking if she was right? We both knew she was. I nodded, and drew my knees up under my chin, looking away.
“Much of your previous experience is marked by extreme trauma and violence. The absence of control, or agency, counts as trauma, don’t give me that look.” I wasn’t even looking at her. “Still with me?”
“Yes, Dr. Bharadwaj.” There were two sleeping drones in my pant pocket, and I took one to hold, because I suddenly needed to do something with my hands.
She snorted, but didn’t sound very amused. “Need a break?”
I considered it, but said “No.” I did rest my cheek on my knee, though.
“Well. Good. The next question would be, do you make choices based on previous experience and adjust them to the situation at hand, or do you follow the same kind of rigid behavior every time? Because I think part of the problem here is that you make the same choice again and again and you don’t know why. ”
I almost felt offended at that, and lifted my head. I had fun coming up with new options, after all, and mostly I was pretty good at it. “Of course I take in the situation first! That’s what this is all about! I’m not a human, humans are lazy like that. When I decide to do something it’s because I think it will have the best outcome for every client involved.”
“Every client involved.”
“That’s what I said.”
A short silence, then she asked, “What about yourself?”
“Huh?”
“Do you make choices that benefit you, too?”
“I try not to die.”
She laughed quietly. “And we’re all thankful for that. Dead friends aren’t ideal.” I got hung up between relating this to Ratthi and Arada almost dying because of me, of the idea of calling them friends , and the fact she was talking about me as a friend. It wasn’t new information at this point, but sometimes being reminded of it did something to my emotions.
I made a clicking noise in my throat because I couldn’t answer. She waited a little bit longer, maybe to give me a break. It felt like a kindness I didn’t deserve.
“Well,” she continued eventually, “to summarize what you just told me: you make the choices that seem right, based on thorough assessment. Sometimes, things go wrong. You still did what you thought was best, and that's all anyone can ever do. And overall, one failure pales in contrast to many, many successes. I think you should forgive yourself.”
Ah, there it was again, the ‘forgiveness’ thing. I had thought about it since last time, and I still didn’t think I deserved that, either. “A SecUnit would be punished, not forgiven. We’re not built with mercy in mind.”
“And you’re not a SecUnit. What you were built to be and what you are are two different things.”
She gave me more time to let that sink in. I mulled it over, because she was right but also she was so, so wrong. She switched to a different toy and I watched her hands go through the repetitive motions of the little bladed spinning tool. It made a nice sound. I tapped my drone with my fingernail.
“Tell me about a choice you made for yourself, not for anyone else.” She said that quietly, gently, like I was fragile. I didn’t like it.
“I hacked my governor module.”
Bharadwaj shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. What did you do for yourself?”
Now I was confused. I hacked my governor module because I didn’t want to kill people anymore. I said, “That was for myself.”
“Yes, alright, I misconstrued that. But please, there has to be more.”
I thought about rescuing Mensah, about trying to help (almost) every single human I had come across, choices made so I could be of use for others. And I thought, and thought, and ART would have made a joke about slow processing speed here. Oh.
“I make the choice to travel with ART when I can. A lot.” That was something I thought about sometimes, too. I didn’t think I was annoying ART, who would be very bored most of the time if I wasn’t there, but sometimes I wondered whether I should be doing that or not.
“ART is your friend. We all like to spend time with friends.”
Assistant , but fine, I didn’t correct her. I said, “Mhm.”
“It’s coming to pick you up again soon, right?”
I nodded. We weren’t going to do anything overly exciting. It had a cargo mission to run, and serials to watch. No other purpose than that, which looking at the situation on the station might be a waste of time.
“You look like you’re thinking about something. Tell me.”
I hesitated. “I keep going back to ART because I don’t know what else to do.”
“You also keep coming back here because you like visiting us.” She paused, a brief quizzical look on her face. “Right?”
“Yes,” I said, faster than I needed to because I didn't like that look on her face. But that was part of the problem - SecUnits weren’t supposed to like things. Not clients, not humans, not staying with a giant ship AI and doing nothing but watching serials together. I knew that was bullshit but it still made me uneasy.
“I’m not sure if the choices I make because I want to do something are right.”
“But you know some of the things you want to do, and that is more than you told me eight years ago,” she said lightly, like insinuating a joke. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be with your… assistant.”
She made it sound so wrong, saying it with that little pause. But humans were just like that, so I let it slide, and just nodded again.
“Why do you like being with ART?”
I’d never really thought about that either, but the answer was obvious. “It’s easy. It’s easy because I don’t have to worry about humans all the time. We… understand each other. Mostly.”
It was Bharadwaj’s turn to nod. “And additionally you’ve accomplished many difficult missions together, and are helping both its university and our research teams to improve their work. I don’t see anything bad about this.”
For some reason hearing someone who knows a lot about emotions and logic and how those two danced around each other say these things made me feel better. Like it was right.
“Now when you say ‘mostly’ understand each other, you probably mean the few times you two have had… disagreements.”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to talk to her anymore at all. She was going to take the ‘you have a relationship’ route again. (The interesting part was that I could tell why I suddenly felt adverse to the conversation. Progress, I guess.)
“Complications are normal. With friends, with family, with strangers on a shuttle somewhere outsystem. Communication isn’t exactly easy. You know that.”
“If it was easy I wouldn’t be here.”
“Partially true. Just, continue to make an effort to fix things when things go wrong. Mistakes happen to all of us. That includes you just as much as myself, or the Perihelion, or Dr. Ratthi. The point is that you work on it together.”
I was reminded of my anger at Ratthi. I suddenly felt like a giant asshole.
“So even Dr. Mensah makes mistakes?” I echoed an old children’s movie I had seen. Bharadwaj barked a laugh.
“You never knew her when her hair was tri-colored.” I tried to imagine it, and got lost for a moment. Bharadwaj said something about digging up old pictures eventually, to annoy me with. We just sat there for a moment, quietly entertaining the idea, although I couldn’t really imagine a hair style that could look bad on Mensah.
“I know you’re very private about your personal connection with ART,” she said, and still didn’t manage to make it sound not-weird, “and I won’t ask more about the topic unless I know you’d like to discuss it. You can, though. I can also offer to talk with you about it in a not so professional setting. I can get drunk while you rant at me, that works wonders sometimes.”
Now I tried to imagine an intoxicated Dr. Bharadwaj, and that was almost more amusing than a multicolored Dr. Mensah.
“What exactly do you want to know? About ART and me?”
“I want to understand your dynamic better. A friendship between a construct and an AI is not completely comparable to human friendships, but still shares many aspects. Do you see the Perihelion as your client?”
“No. We’re mutually administrative assistants. That means no one is giving anyone orders.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “To make this clear: you remain a free agent when you’re aboard the Perihelion .” There wasn’t exactly doubt in her voice. Concern, maybe.
“ART is an asshole but it’s not that kind of an asshole. We trust each other.” We did. Saying it out loud felt strange, but true.
“That’s good to hear. You mentioned things were complicated sometimes. Is that a current problem, or even a recurring one?”
“It’s not really a problem. A problem is getting deleted by aliens and abducting your friend to get your crew back, and that hasn’t happened in a while.”
Bharadwaj made a long humming noise, which underlined the sarcasm in my last sentence nicely. She nodded. “Do you still have nightmares about that? It hasn’t come up in a while.”
So first of all, I didn’t have nightmares . I had memory bank integration errors. Rarely. I suddenly felt uneasy, and shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Right. Just one more thing, SecUnit. Then I’ll let you go.” She leaned forward, her eyes fixed on my fidgety hands. My unease grew.
“Thank you. For all you do. In the name of everyone you care about, of everyone you protect even when they are not aware of it. Thank you for every pesky little drone you keep tracking us with. And thank you for your worry. Most of us would be less alive than we are right now if it wasn’t for you.”
I inhaled to counter this with the fact that if it wasn’t for me, a lot of life threatening things wouldn’t have happened. A lot of actual nightmares my humans accumulated over the years wouldn’t have happened. I closed my mouth again, forcefully, making my teeth click together. Bharadwaj sounded honest. I knew she meant it. And I knew that if I let the thought settle, I would believe her.
No.
Underneath all that feeling of inadequacy, of knowing I could have done better, I knew she was right. Humans suck at doing their own security. That’s what I was for. I had no idea what to say, so I looked at her face. Not her eyes, but somewhere on her forehead. That’s all she’d get from me. I nodded.
Bharadwaj smiled, a visible warmth spreading in the lines of her face. “I’m glad.”
I nodded again. I don’t think she was disappointed at my lack of response. There was a strange prickling sensation on the bridge of my nose and I had to sniff. I said goodbye as politely as I could after that, and had to wipe some fluid off my face on the way out. I hate leaking, I genuinely do, but somehow I felt less terrible after that.
.-.. . - .. - --- ..- - -- ..- .-. -.. . .-. -... --- -
Sitting in silence with a human who leaves you alone could be pretty nice. I hadn’t paid attention to the amount of cycles that passed since I arrived at the station, since I still prefer to count time in hours, so the fact that suddenly many of the station humans had the entire cycle off had startled me. The station had semi-public places where one could sit and just not do anything, partitioned by large biomes or glass structures, which were more crowded than usual today. Finding an emptier area took a while. I finally sat beside one of the larger plant biomes (it smelled nice) and started reading a book that one of Mensah’s children had thrown my way (an actual, physical book, with pages made of compressed plant fiber and everything. It was slow to read, but I kind of liked it.)
When Gurathin showed up a while later with a book of his own, I was only momentarily surprised. I might have gotten the idea to come here specifically because I had seen him sit here before, doing the same. He sat down a good few meters away from me in the same area, folded one leg under himself, and just started reading. (I zoomed in on the book - the novel predecessor of Lineages of the Sun , which I had seen as a serial. From his frowny face every few pages I could tell it was just as much of a tangled disaster as the adaptation was.) He didn’t ask me what I was reading. He did, however, at some point look up to glance at my book, and I lifted it a bit. He nodded, and I tapped the feed.
If it wasn’t for my drone swarm surveilling the area, I might have missed Mensah and Pin-Lee joining us, because the plot in my book was getting pretty intense and I was three layers too many invested in it. Then Pin-Lee said, “Hi!” and Dr. Mensah asked, “Do you mind if we join you?” Which I would have noticed even without drones.
Gurathin said, “Sure,” and motioned across the general sitting space with his hand. There was some smalltalk. I looked up right when Pin-Lee made a half-smile-half-grimace face at Gurathin, who sighed, and Mensah caught my gaze for a moment. She squinted her eyes at me in the small fleeting smile humans sometimes greet each other with and then also sat down, her attention on Pin-Lee and Ratthi and the cup of liquid she was holding. It was steaming, and Gurathin gave it a stare like he wanted some, too.
He closed the book, left, and came back thirteen minutes later with a cup of his own. In the meantime, Mensah and Pin-Lee discussed something not work or security related, so I only half-listened. They kept their voices low which I assumed was to let Gurathin read.
I started getting suspicious when Overse walked by and asked if there was still space for her, too. She plopped down between Gurathin and me and took her shoes off. (There was still a lot of space between her and me, which was good.) She mentioned that Arada was currently still busy but might swing by later, and that she could bring dinner along and oh. A lot of time had passed since I first sat down.
And then my book was finished. I put it down on my lap and stared into the middle distance, processing. Pin-Lee said, “That bad?”
“Only if you consider the main character resolving the entire conflict by sheer dumb luck, learning nothing, and going right back to where they were at the start of the book to be bad,” I said. Pin-Lee replied with a very creative curse. Dr. Mensah said, “Can I have a look?”
I handed her the book. “Oh, Lamisi gave you that, right? Xe’s been telling us about this for cycles on end. I think by now we’ve all read it.”
“I… can see why,” I said. I kind of did. There were so many layers to how this plot could have gone I thought I might be trying to figure out better or alternate paths for at least a few hours.
“Want me to give it back to xem? I’ll go back to the farm in a few days,” she asked. I nodded. That way I didn’t have to send it and attach a potentially awkward feedback note. But now that I knew Mesah’s offspring liked talking about this book, I might at least draft some kind of review for xem. Apparently my media reviews were funny, at least according to Ratthi, who had mentioned that once.
Ratthi, who hadn’t yet joined this (probably not very) spontaneous gathering. I looked around to see if I had just missed his arrival, but there was no trace of him. None of my other humans seemed overly nervous, if anything they didn’t seem occupied with much at all. Gurathin wasn’t paying attention to his own book or the conversation that was picking up again between Pin-Lee and Overse. I didn’t know what to make of this, so I began drafting the review for Lamisi.
Arada showed up some time later carrying multiple steaming boxes that smelled of starchy foods, which caused general excitement. (I scanned Arada superficially for signs of unwellness, but beside the slightly elevated body temperature I found nothing.)
I turned down my auditory input so the eating noises weren’t as grating and pulled up a serial while watching the station’s public area’s lights slowly shift into the dimmer night-cycle mode. Daylight on stations was artificial, but Preservation Station made sure to implement some kind of light-dark rhythm to facilitate regular sleep. Corporation Rim stations rarely did that.
The last to join the group was Bharadwaj, who apparently had done some work today even though she was supposed to be off as well. The others admonished her for that, and there was a bit of bickering between her and Mensah in which they called each other out for bad habits, which was funny. Bharadwaj sat down closest to me, which I didn’t mind. Over the feed she asked me how I was doing, and I sent her the first few lines of that book review. From the wild twitching spreading across her face she had a lot of trouble not breaking into laughter. She seemed a bit tired, judging from her lack of participation in the conversation, and joined me in simply observing the others, though she sometimes threw in a comment or two.
I switched to Sanctuary Moon and pulled one of the earliest episodes into the common feed, then sent an open ping, in case anyone else wanted to watch too. Pin-Lee did so immediately, and began making comments about how baby-faced the actors still were in the earlier seasons. Nostalgia is the right word for what she was describing, I think, and I felt it too, at least a little bit. Bit by bit, the others joined in. It was nice. After two episodes, Mensah decided to retire, hesitant to break the communal activity but too sensible to push herself. Gurathin took the opportunity and also excused himself. On a planet, it would have been getting colder by then, causing a faster retreat of the humans to their resting quarters, but the station remained pleasant at night. Only when Overse dozed off on Arada’s shoulder did the two decide to leave as well. Bharadwaj stayed the longest, even though she had been tired when she arrived.
I reminded her that she, too, was a human who needed rest periods, to which she agreed. When she got up to leave, she brushed my shoulder with her hand, lightly, to say goodbye. She also left behind that layered fidgeting tool - I sent her a feed message when I noticed, but she said she’d just pick it up the next day. I sat in the now empty common area for a while, flipping the tool open and shut idly. I was alone again, but not lonely. Thirteen minutes before the common area closed down, I made my way back to my hotel.
-. --- - . ...- . -. -.-- --- ..- .-. .... ..- -- .- -. ... .- .-. . --. .-. . .- - .- - - .... .. …
It was less than five cycles before I had to leave, and I still hadn’t heard from Ratthi. He wasn’t at what I later learned was my going away party, and his feed had been marked as inactive. I still had drones on him, so I knew he was alive and going about his normal business. (I had the drones hang back, since it felt kind of like maybe I needed to give him space. I just hadn’t expected how much. )
I wondered if he was mad at me. Everyone was less pissed off at each other now, but the subject still felt dangerous at times. Ratthi had taken it the hardest, and I couldn’t blame him if he was still upset.
I didn’t like this; I didn’t like staying mad. I didn’t like that it was happening to Ratthi, who had always been the loudest about defending my personhood (I meant this literally; he often yelled.) It wasn’t right and I may have a skewed moral compass or whatever, but I knew this wasn’t right .
I had no clue what to do about it.
Actually, maybe I did. I started a feed search.
-
[Dr. Ratthi, 07:35:32] SecUnit, why do I have a ticket in my feed for a play this afternoon.
[SecUnit, 07:35:34] Because we’re going to a play this afternoon.
[Dr. Ratthi, 07:37:12] I can’t, I have work to do.
[SecUnit, 07:37:13] > Dr_Ratthi_Itinerary.file
[Dr. Ratthi, 07:43:42] SecUnit, you can’t just hack my schedule like that.
(My humans could be so funny, sometimes.)
[SecUnit, 07:43:45] Incorrect, Ratthi. I can.
[Dr. Ratthi, 07:50:56] You could get in trouble.
[SecUnit, 07:50:60] I was granted special permission.
[Dr. Ratthi, 07:51:02] By who? You know what nevermind.
[Dr. Ratthi, 07:62:69] Ok. I’ll be there.
I had kind of wanted him to ask me who had granted me the permission in earnest. Then I could be very smug and say “me” and Ratthi could be exasperated and maybe reprimand me for the action and it would have felt a little less like he wasn’t currently infected with aliens and a little more like everything was fine. But I rarely got what I wanted.
I met him outside the theater ten minutes before the play was supposed to start. I had purchased a package of candy I knew he liked from the vending machine.
“What made you pick this one?” He asked, and accepted the candy.
“I figured you would like it.”
“Oh well, good eye. I’ve been meaning to see this one but I’ve been busy with…” he trailed off when he remembered I knew exactly what he had been busy with.
We went in to find good seats and I abruptly realized I had no idea what to say to him. It seemed stupid to try now, with the play going to begin in just a few minutes so I just sat and resisted the temptation to start some media.
I did a scan of him. Same mild fever and high blood pressure as before. It was only a little comforting, and by that I meant not comforting at all. I wanted him back to normal.
“Find anything disconcerting with your scan?” he asked too casually, sparing me a glance.
“Yes, but it’s the same stuff as usual. How did you know I scanned you?” It had to be a lucky guess. I was almost always scanning my humans.
“They,” he put his hand on his chest, “can feel scans. I just found out recently, since our communication has been getting better.”
Yeah, so, I wasn’t going to freak out about that. Nope.
“Cool,” I said because what the fuck else was I supposed to say?
The play started shortly after that and I focused on it. I recorded it even though it wasn’t really to my taste. It was a romance about two couples going on an epic quest to save the other from certain doom or something. There was a four way marriage in the last scene and they all ran off in a new transport they had been gifted by a previously unknown rich family member that showed up halfway through the last act.
It wasn’t awful, all things considered. Maybe I’d watch it with ART. It would have a field day tearing it apart.
By the end of the play I had mostly figured out how to start talking to Ratthi, but after that I had no idea.
“Have you eaten?” I asked. I knew he hadn’t, not since the midday meal.
He shook his head and we left to go to one of the late cycle food stalls. We sat at a table and I tried not to see too much of his eating and tried to find a way to say something to him because now that we were here my half thought out plans were rapidly falling to pieces.
But I didn’t have to worry about it, because after Ratthi returned from recycling the waste from his meal, he sat back down.
“So I’m guessing this wasn’t just because you wanted to see a play with me?” he said after a pause that felt like an eternity but was only 30 seconds.
I shook my head. “I wanted to talk to you before I leave.” It took a lot of self control for me to not blurt out “ why have you been avoiding me? ” because that would be an asshole move and the conversation(?) would rapidly go downhill.
“I figured as much,” he sighed and I realized he probably thought I had only done this to talk to him.
“But I mean I also kind of wanted to go see a play. With you,” I said and wow why was that so weird and difficult to admit? But it wasn’t entirely terrible.
He smiled and it made the weirdness worth it.
“Thank you for the tickets, by the way. I did like the play, and I’m glad you came with me,” he said and he was looking down at his hands in that way humans do when a conversation is too emotionally loaded for them to handle. I knew this because I would be doing the same, but I was already looking at the wall far to the right of Ratthi.
I guess I had to take the plunge at some point, and say something, but then Ratthi beat me to the punch again.
“I understand why you’re still mad at me. I hope you can forgive me, someday. Maybe after this is all over,” he said. That made me look at him.
“What? I’m not mad at you. I thought you were mad at me ,” I said and I probably sounded as surprised as I felt. Ratthi looked up for a second and we held eye contact before his face scrunched up and he laughed.
“No! I’m not mad at you! I feel really bad, actually, for upsetting you. I know you take it really hard when we’re hurt, even when it's not in your control, and I’ve felt like pure shit this whole time. And the fact that I’m still, you know.” He waved vaguely at himself so I helpfully supplied,
“Infected?”
That got me a sharp look, but I knew it wasn’t a serious one, so I didn’t take it personally.
“So we both thought the other was mad at us. Fantastic,” he said eventually, and his gaze settled on my chest. He was still kind of smiling.
“So it seems. I was angry with you, for a while, and I still don’t like what’s happening to you. The sooner it's over the better,” I said.
Ratthi waited, and then rolled his eyes. “I’m waiting for the ‘but’, SecUnit.”
“But, I can kind of understand why you were worried. To clarify, it was still a shitty move. Like, really shitty, but I get it, a little. So I’m not mad at you.”
Ratthi leaned back and smiled. “Ok, I can live with that. And I’m sorry about that time I tried to apologise but I was just trying to force you to accept my point of view. I shouldn’t have tried to force you to do anything.”
“I forgive you.” And I did. I had decided it when he arrived at the theater, and I had seen how tired he looked. I had kind of already decided it, but that solidified it.
Ratthi didn’t look as tired now; he looked a little like how he did pre-infection.
“I’m a little sad we wasted so much time being mad and upset with each other that we didn’t even get to go see the new installment of Stargoons ,” he said, suddenly frowning.
I checked the feed.
“There’s a showing in half an hour, if you want to go see it now,” I said.
His frown deepened, which I didn’t like. “I can’t. I have an early morning.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, well, I can fix that . If you wanted me to,” I added quickly.
He made a skeptical face, but smiled. “Fuck it. Sure. Let’s go.”
And this is why Ratthi was my favorite human to watch media with.
.-.. .. - - .-.. . .- -- -... .- .--. --- .-.. --- --. -.-- .- ... .- - .-. . .- -
Mensah messaged me an hour before ART’s scheduled take-off that she wanted to have a private conversation with me. She helpfully added that it was not about anything negative or bad, which was nice of her. I pushed that little bit of nervous prickling all the way down and ignored it when I met her in the half-open building she had just finished her meal break in. It was odd that she wanted a conversation in person - we could easily communicate over the feed or a comm link, after all. So maybe I was a little bit nervous. Not nervous enough to drop my performance reliability, though.
She greeted me with a warm smile, which caused a few more lines around her eyes than the last time I had really looked at her. As I changed to stare at her shoulder instead of her face, I noticed something else.
“Can’t keep anything a secret from you, huh?” She commented, and patted the paper bag beside her chair before getting up. One of my camera drones zoomed in, but I couldn’t make out any more details than that there was something bulky in the bag.
“Let’s go.” She got up, stretched, and took the tray with food utensils on it to the automated return belt. I waited, a little unsure what to do, but when she came back she picked up the paper bag, again with that smile on her face that said something else that I was also unsure about. I followed her onto the plaza outside, which wasn’t very crowded at the moment. She told me about her day, complained a bit, but seemed to focus on good things that had happened over the past two cycles. I didn’t really say anything, only made some reactive faces and sounds.
We went for a walk. That’s the human equivalent to patrolling (when you want to move around but don’t really have a reason to). I was still waiting for this private conversation she wanted to have with me. Walks sometimes were excuses to ease into conversations, and waiting for humans to say something to me wasn’t really one of my favorite things (even if it was Mensah.)
“Dr. Mensah, what did you want to talk to me about?” She stopped walking and looked around. Then she pointed to an out of the way path.
“Let’s go that way, and then I’ll tell you.” I ran a threat assessment out of habit, because this was at least a little bit suspicious. First a mysterious bag, and now a secluded path. Like a thriller show I had recently watched. Well, not really, but still. Threat assessment pulled up a number so low I dismissed it immediately, typical for Boring Preservation Station.
My face must have done something, because Mensah added, “Don’t worry, it’s just a surprise,” as if that helped. Surprises usually weren’t good. I sent a drone into the alley before I let her walk into it. The alley was empty, and didn’t resemble the type of alley that might contain a dead human or something like in some of my media.
“Please explain,” I said.
Mensah held out the paper bag to me, with both hands. “This is for you.” I blinked.
“What is it?”
“It’s a gift. You don’t have to accept it, of course, but please at least look at it.”
I took the bag from her, with both hands too, because that’s how humans took delicate things from another human. It was surprisingly light. I stood there for a moment with the bag in my hand, just looking at it and finding that the thing (the gift) inside was wrapped up in something dark.
“Uh,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Mensah took a few steps backward and leaned against the wall of the building that lined the alley. “Open it. Take your time. That’s why we’re here, and not in front of anyone. I can leave you for a bit, if you like.”
I turned around to face the opposite wall. There, that was easier. From a spike in feed activity I could tell Mensah started checking her messages. She wasn’t supposed to do that during break time, but I think she was doing it for me. That did something fuzzy to my organics. I examined the contents of the bag. What I had thought was the wrapping for the item turned out to be the item. It was a neatly folded large piece of thick fabric. The drone I had on Mensah confirmed that she wasn’t actively watching me, so I put the bag on the floor and unfolded the fabric.
It was handmade, which meant it came from one of Preservation’s primary planets and not a recycler, a heavy layer of felt-like fabric between two thinner layers of patterned woven fabric. The pattern was familiar. I had seen it before on the seams of Mensah’s tunic, as well as used in applications for all kinds of items (knapsacks, cloths designed to cover tables, curtains, clothing, etc), but the colors were more muted than was customary. A flat green, steel grey, and a cool dark blue, zigzagging. It was soft. It felt soft. I also, somehow, felt soft. After running a composition analysis, (the central layer included fibres from the fur shorn off animals similar to those living on Mensah’s family farm), I folded it again and put it back in the bag.
To Mensah I said, “I have no use for this.”
Mensah made a pensive humming noise. “What do you think this is used for?”
I rolled my eyes. As if I didn’t know what a blanket was. “A blanket is a large piece of woollen or similar material used as a covering on a bed or elsewhere for warmth.”
Now it was Mensah who rolled her eyes, while shortly breathing out through her nose. “Exactly. For warmth. For when you feel cold.”
I considered telling her that I could manually regulate my body temperature, and then I remembered how many times she had seen me failing at that. The miserable little emergency blanket I had tried to hide under when she first really talked to me. I knew Dr. Mensah well, by now, and I wasn’t dense. I recognized the blanket’s grey as the color of PresAux’s crew uniform, the dark green used to represent the Preservation Alliance. She had put a lot of thought into this gift.
I had been quiet too long, it seemed, because Mensah added, “Your drones were all in good shape, but I wanted to give you something to take with you that reminds you of home if - if you ever need that.”
I wasn’t planning on letting go of the bag again, I noticed. I felt like my inorganics were melting. Turning around to her I said, “Thank you, Dr. Mensah.”
Her smile changed from small and twinkly to broad and shining, eyes closed and everything. Then she schooled her expression back into something calmer, and she pushed off the wall. “You’re welcome, SecUnit. I hope you like it.”
I sent her an acknowledgement, because my voice had already wobbled a little on those last words. Mensah wasn’t augmented, or a bot, so she wouldn’t catch the emotional undercurrent in the acknowledgement, but I was sure she knew anyway.
We continued our walk towards the docks, and I had a very complicated feeling about leaving, suddenly. Not in a bad way. Just complicated.
She walked me all the way to the docks, and turned to me. Humans all had this habit of turning one goodbye into several goodbyes, and for the most part they managed to keep it brief with me.
But I could make an exception for Mensah.
“You be good, now,” she said and I rolled my eyes which made her smile. “You take care of everyone so well, I need you to take care of yourself, too.” I just nodded, not sure how to respond.
Normally humans liked to touch each other in some way to say goodbye, but Mensah refrained, which I appreciated.
I watched her walk away with a drone that would follow her back to her office and go dormant there until I returned.
I resumed walking to the dock ART was scheduled to arrive at and nearly stopped when I saw Amena sitting on the bench outside the airlock corridor. She was playing some color matching game in the feed.
I rounded the corner and cleared my throat, which brought her attention out of her game.
“Oh, hey SecUnit.” She smiled and her gaze landed on my arm.
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh I just thought I’d see you off. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. And I thought I’d say hello to ART when it got in range,” she lied.
Iris is not currently on board, Amena. I’m on the return from a crewless cargo run, ART said, appearing in the feed so suddenly I blinked.
“Asshole, have you been within range this whole time? And spying on me? If I can’t hack the station’s systems, you don’t get to either,” I said, and made a point of putting together a complaint form for station security (I kept a blank on hand, so I didn’t need to pull it from their feed.)
Oh fine. I’ll leave your precious systems. I did a light amount of hacking to verify that it was actually leaving the station systems, staring it down as best I could, before receding.
Amena looked disappointed.
Oh, well, ok. Thanks ART. I’ll be seeing you semester after next!
I look forward to it, Amena.
Amena stood and looked at my chest before her gaze went to the bag where the top of the blanket was visible. She smiled.
“I’ll see you then, too, SecUnit. You two take good care of eachother, ok? No getting blown to bits,” she said and it was meant to be funny, and it kind of was. Mostly.
She walked away but before she went around the corner, she turned and waved at me one more time. I lifted a hand in her direction, facing the wall.
When she was gone, I went and sat down on the bench she had been sitting on, with my knees to my chest. This was at one of the further ends of the station, where the big transports could dock. There were less people down here.
How long have you been in range? You should have come through the wormhole hours ago. I thought you were late.
I’m perfectly on time, as always.
I scoffed. What, so you’ve just been lurking in the station’s systems this whole time?
More or less.
You know if security had caught you I’d have heard an earful about it.
If ART had eyes, it would have rolled them. They never would have found me.
I rolled my eyes right back.
I was thinking of saying something, when I realized ART was in my system. It was pulling a diagnostic report.
Hey, stop that. I did the equivalent of smacking its hands away from my system data. I'm fine. Didn't even get shot at.
It was supposed to be a joke, but then it was pulling data from my system that recorded every time my skin was regenerated. There was probably something in there about when my hand got smashed under one of Gurathin’s large rock samples by accident, but that would be all it found.
Seriously? You sit in the feed for how many hours and spy on me, don't even say hello, and now you're trying to pull diagnostics on me? Rude.
I rode the feed back to its system that housed its diagnostic data. I couldn't get through its wall, but I could poke at it pretty hard. It backed out of my systems and pushed me back to myself. And by "pushed me back", imagine being goaded towards something slowly and carefully by an extremely large construction vehicle that could squish you if it even went a little bit faster.
I wanted to give you privacy with your humans. It said after a minute. If I could have rolled my eyes any harder I would have. I gave it another jab, and brought up some media.
Sure. Now watch this with me unless you want to keep being bored for the rest of your way back here.
It didn't say anything, but its presence in my feed increased.
Halfway through the second episode of Revival of the Void , I reopened our feed connection completely, so it was restored to what it had been before I had throttled it, back when I was having my minor emotional breakdown after exploring ART’s internal systems, right before coming back to Preservation and going on the fucking cursed survey. I had tried to be slow about it so ART wouldn't notice, but I knew that was in vain.
It's attention came down on me, but it didn't say anything. I couldn't tell if that was intentional or if ART wasn't sure what to say. I wasn't really, either.
Bharadwaj and I talked a lot. I kind of sort of figured out some things.
OK .
I could tell it wanted to ask more, but was holding back. I didn't like this weird tension we were having, even if it was my fault. I'd had too many weird tensions in the last 4500 hours since this visit to Preservation had begun, and I was sick of them.
I poked at it. It poked back.
Will you tell me next time you’re dealing with emotional distress? Even if I can’t help, I’d like to know, It asked.
I thought about it, and sent an affirmative. It didn't respond, but I could tell by the way it refocused its attention back on the media that was enough, for now. I'd tell it everything I had learned on this trip back, eventually; I always did. Just not now.
I had kind of forgotten how empty my feed felt, now that it was full of ART again.
I think I had missed it.
Maybe I would tell it that, sometime, too.
I missed you too.
This time I did manage to roll my eyes harder. It only hurt a little bit.
Notes:
ID: the classic meme 'all the things!' by Allie Brosh. A simple drawing of a person triumphantly punching the air and screaming 'Give Murderbot ALL THE BLANKETS'! The person is depicted on a yellow, flame like background and is holding a clipart drawing of a blanket that has been added to the meme. /end ID
Chapter 7
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter:
-ART being anxious (Anxious Research Transport lol)
-This chapter contains what could be interpreted as bot brain sex. The beginning and end of the scene will have a 'xxx' so that you can F3 and skip over it, if you don't want to read it. And after the scene is over, ART does narrate a little about what just happened.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
I could begin to describe the feelings of relief that having SecUnit back aboard brought me, but then I would go on forever and get nothing done. Having SecUnit within my interior was good. I did cargo missions for my crew, on behalf of our endless objective to alleviate innocent people of corporate hooks, and I was happy to fulfill that duty for the mission. But that did not mean I had to enjoy it, or relish in it, or not feel like the inside of my mind was curdling in on itself like spoiled mammalian lactate.
So it was good, when SecUnit came back. It was less than good, however, that I was going from one cargo mission to a second with only a brief pause at the Preservation Alliance station to pick up SecUnit. It was even worse that it would be another two and a half Mihiran standard months before I would be reunited with the rest of my crew, when it had already been three months since I last saw them.
SecUnit’s presence helped the almost-madness that boredom brought me, but it did not manage to prevent it entirely. If too many subsections of my consciousness are unoccupied for too long, they will try to fill themselves. Some are more productive than others. Some lead to interesting conclusions, others to spirals. SecUnit’s presence significantly abated those symptoms, at least.
My perception of time, reality, their overlay, and all the endless possibilities in between differ vastly from what a human brain, a human/bot construct brain, or most other Artificial Intelligences are capable of. I will admit that that could sometimes feel a little, as humans without knowledge of greater intelligences beyond their own scope might call it, alienating.
After I debated with multiple partitions of myself over my personal feelings on this matter, I had come to a conclusion that left me with several options to continue forward. First I had to admit to myself that sometimes, this alienation made me feel alone. The feeling of aloneness in itself is not a terrible one, since within this universe one can never truly be alone. I, of all, should know that best. But sometimes, from ‘alone’ rose loneliness, and that’s not a feeling I enjoy. I had learned, in my many years as a research vessel housing and hosting multitudes of humans of different ages, that I could feel loneliness despite having human crew and students and teachers crowd every one of my corridors, even when my processors are full of equations and mappings and exploration.
And sometimes, the opposite of loneliness takes hold in my consciousness only when my hallways are empty and the only one on board is SecUnit. Having both human crew and SecUnit aboard is, for me, the most ideal situation, since then both my desire to care for my crew as well as someone that not only wishes to understand me but is capable of it are present within my awareness. In those situations, SecUnit preferred to avoid and at times shun human company. It still spends time with me, since there is no way not to spend time with me when someone resides within my hull, but it showed a certain restraint. That was not the case when it was just SecUnit and me, and I enjoy these instances a lot. Not only and not firstly because it battles my boredom on otherwise uneventful trips, but mostly because SecUnit shows a different demeanor when it feels safe. I’m 98.7% sure that it feels safe, when it is alone with me. (Unless I prod it about its emotions or past experiences.)
Which meant I could observe behaviors it only displayed when it was with me.
Those observations distracted me from the bore of cargo missions, as well as the increasing unease of the cargo I was transporting.
If I had skin, I think I would try to crawl out of it.
Instead I had a hull, and several modules meant for teaching and expanding the human mind that were currently full of stuff and things that greedy capitalists would sell for twice or more of their fair market price to people who desperately needed them or wanted them because they had been brainwashed into thinking they did and that they would be gouged of their autonomy in order to attain these things. The implications of what I was participating in would eat me alive not only until the cargo was unloaded, but until I was out of the sector.
It was very, very good SecUnit came with me on this second trip.
I had missed it, and it had missed me, and the glitchy, itchy, awful bugs that had clogged my emotional library finally, finally cleared up. The files I had on relief and similar emotions danced all around the many sections of my internal systems.
SecUnit kept our feed connection wide open for me, and feeling how it perceived the world was like the defragmentation to end all defragmentations.
I would be alright; I would not consume myself from the inside out, as long as I had SecUnit with me.
That is an interesting fidget object. Did one of your humans give it to you? I asked it after I saw it flipping a fake knife between its hands for the third time since it had boarded.
“Bharadwaj left it with me, so I guess it’s a gift. She uses these a lot,” it said, and three separate sections of my mind ran off with this information, documenting SecUnit’s pleasant emotional feedback from using the object, the sensation of it in its hand, and the auditory response it had from the sound of the object clicking open and snapping shut.
Many of my crew use fidget toys. They are good for helping you focus. I had meant this to be a positive statement, to encourage the continued use of the object, but I knew by SecUnit’s slight frown that it had been the wrong thing to say almost immediately. It stopped flipping the knife.
Why did you stop? Was it because I compared it to human behavior? I asked. SecUnit was illogical at the best of times, and several of my mind-sections were eager to begin untangling this latest emotional knot. I felt bad, occasionally, that some parts of me saw SecUnit as the universe’s most intricate puzzle, and desired nothing more than to solve it. I reminded myself this desire stemmed from my other desires to understand it, and to see it happy, and unburdened. (If anyone ever thinks bots are incapable of having astronomically big goals and dreams, I will happily correct them.)
It made an aborted movement with its shoulders, and I knew I was correct.
Does your human not do the same thing? If the thought of humans using that object for the same reasons as you appalls you, then I have very bad news about chairs. Actually, I take that back. I’ve never once seen you sit in a chair properly.
SecUnit rolled its eyes, and leaned back in the chair it was sitting in (incorrectly, I should state. It had one leg over the armrest, the other foot on the floor, and its head on the other arm rest. It was practically lying down in a chair not meant for lying down in. I could not understand it.)
“Maybe a little bit. Maybe a little of something else, I’m not sure,” it said, and went from having 60% of my attention to 73% in short order.
What do you mean?
It opened the tool back up and flipped it around in that intricate way that reminded me of dancing, before it snapped it closed.
“I had to write code to make myself fidget to appear human; but this isn’t part of that. I’m doing this intentionally.” SecUnit hesitated for 0.5 seconds, trying to find the right words to explain its thoughts. I was patient, and refrained from pinging it.
“It seems like a waste of resources, and it incapacitates one of my hands,” it finally said.
You don’t need to use both of your hands, currently. And if you did, it would take very little time for your hand to be free.
“But what if I did? There could be a delay.“ It frowned. “It seems stupid, saying this out loud,” it admitted (which I was pleased to hear since that meant I wouldn’t have to point that out, which could lead to SecUnit thinking I was insulting it). It usually frowned, but of the 46 different types of frown-expressions SecUnit had, this one indicated that it was doubting one or more actions that it had taken or was currently taking. I would prefer the frown it had when it was enjoying itself. (Iris had told me in private that SecUnit had a “resting frowny face”. I had agreed, and added this term to my library of playful insults for future instances of banter with SecUnit. I have not used it yet, but it will be extremely funny when I do.)
You’re doubting the use of such an activity, and why you should continue it. This was a statement, not a question, but I would let SecUnit think it was.
Its frown deepened and I knew I was correct, again.
Why do you continue to take the action, then?
SecUnit shrugged. I did not deign to respond, and stayed silent so that it could come up with a better answer. I shuffled some data around, checked on the oxygen levels in every section of my interior (the corporate cargo did not require oxygen, but some of the delicate lab equipment that was still onboard could take damage in a low oxygen environment, so certain levels had to be maintained), adjusted the water filtration levels of SecUnit’s bathroom, and deployed a drone to Turi’s room to pick up some trash. (They had left behind said trash last time they disembarked, and I had planned to leave it there and make them pick it up when I returned to the Pansystem, but restlessness demanded me to end the untidiness.)
In the 32 seconds this took, SecUnit seemed no closer to an answer, and, in fact, appeared more stressed out by thinking about my question. I offered it an episode of Sanctuary Moon, which it took and began playing. We had seen this episode together exactly 209 times, so I did not focus on it too much. I did, however, sit in its feed, because the reactions SecUnit had when we watched the serial (these emotional responses were already well catalogued, since I had had a chance to witness them a number of times) were always soothing. I believe taking in the responses did something for me similar to what watching Sanctuary Moon did for SecUnit. (Of course I would never tell it this (at least not anytime soon), considering how emotionally charged the concept might be for SecUnit.)
So we watched Sanctuary Moon . I tried not to think too hard about the fucking cargo, and I did my best to make my presence in SecUnit’s feed as comfortable as possible.
After an episode it resumed idly flipping the blade.
It just feels nice, it said suddenly. The spontaneous utilization of the feed to communicate instead of verbalizing indicated just how much of an effort admitting this was for it.
It was nice. The emotional feedback I received was fascinating. I could fathom, logically, scientifically, why my crew used tactile stimulation objects, but now I understood it. The pleasant sensation of a repeated motion and the sound of the object as it moved, even the visual stimulus it provided, were mesmerizing.
I can see why people like them, I said .
SecUnit looked thoughtful, and continued to flip the tool around.
I kind of wish it was smoother, it said after a moment, and that caught even more of my attention.
Smoother how?
It reached into its pocket and pulled out a damaged drone. I recognized it as the same drone it had damaged the first time I had had to pilot its body in order to extract it and Turi from a raider infested colony that my crew had been trying to help (before we discovered the raiders, that is.)
SecUnit rolled the drone in between its hands, slowly and then quickly before it switched to worrying one of the indents with its thumb, which was (not coincidentally) the same size as its thumb. I took in the tactile data, and found it to be equally as pleasant as the data from the simulacrum knife, but different in an exciting way. I activated a fabricator in an empty room far enough from SecUnit that it would not be able to hear its hum.
That’s also nice.
Recreating the knife was easy enough; I had the base casting forms and blueprints in my library of close quarter weapons that I rarely had a chance to utilize. The fabricator was already in the process of pouring metal when SecUnit responded to my statement with a shrug. I did not afford this gesture a response either, other than to offer another episode of Sanctuary Moon .
Twelve and half standard hours later we had gone through six different inert knife prototypes until we discovered a comfortable combination of smoothness in both feel, movement, and weight that SecUnit liked the most.
It fidgeted with the new knife the entire time we watched an as of yet unknown piece of media I had found at the last port. Further, I had sent drones to my crew’s quarters and examined a few of the fidget objects that they had left on board. I began working on some other prototypes for SecUnit I thought it might enjoy, but decided that any more work on the subject might make it uncomfortable. SecUnit typically had an absolute limit on this type of topic that was reached far more quickly than mine.
But I was still quite curious.
Would you like me to repair that drone?
“No, it’s fine,” SecUnit said.
I could repair it enough for it to function without changing the dents. The lens is cracked on it, currently.
SecUnit thought on this for just a moment before shrugging.
It flew the drone into the nearest recycler, and I got to work on repairing it, adding a few modifications to it that I desired. The immediate reaction surprised and pleased me. There was no scepticism or underlying frustration - SecUnit had been calmer since it returned from Preservation. It seemed as if spending time with its humans had a similar effect on it as spending dedicated time with my crew did for me.
(After a short debate with other sub-sections of my mind, I decided against sending Dr. Bharadwaj a gift basket for her efforts, no matter how heroic they were. It would be weird, as Iris might put it. I would simply have to continue leaving untraceable, self-replicating and difficult to delete copies of her documentary that featured SecUnit at every port I went to.) (Maybe I would have SecUnit bring her one of my new types of fidget objects.)
I hunkered down in the feed with SecUnit as much as possible, letting its emotional feedback and the media absorb as much of my attention as I could reasonably allow. It didn’t react to my bearing down on it, which I appreciated, because if it had I might have had to recede from it, and then I would have been back to eating my own metaphorical tail and spinning out endlessly in my currently underutilized processing capacity.
And, almost as though it was receiving emotional feedback from me (0.001 seconds later I confirmed that it definitely wasn’t), SecUnit brought up WorldHoppers , and started it from my favorite episode, on my favorite scene.
It was good to have SecUnit back.
.-- . .- .-. . -. --- - ... .--. --- -. ... . .-. . -.. -... -.-- ..-. .. -.. --. . - - --- -.-- ...
We watched more things together for three entire cycles, and I managed to ignore the sections of my mind that went mad.
As far as I could tell, there were hardly any undercurrents of emotional difficulties troubling SecUnit for the moment, which was rare, and ideal. I was the one with emotional difficulties, at the moment, but I was not going to overwhelm SecUnit with that unless it had the needed ‘emotional bandwidth,’ as I have heard humans call it. I could keep my increasing anxiety to myself, I had decided.
(‘Guilt’ was another word that floated up in the one sub-sections of my mind that insisted on being particularly distraught - for feeling off-kilter despite SecUnit’s presence.)
Between media, we intermittently worked on the fidgeting tools together, and brainstormed concepts for drones that could be useful, if needlessly difficult. It was a fun hypothetical to play with, if only I could properly cast out the parts of me that were losing their marbles, as it were.
Maybe I was envying SecUnit for its fidgeting tool. It was not using it at the moment, hands idle in its lap as it complained about a plot hole in the movie we were planning to watch the sequel of.
SecUnit pinged me through the feed. It was sitting in the lounge, on the specific couch that some of my crew sometimes took short rest periods on, and it was leaning its head against my wall lining. I will admit I had been considering implementing a heating function into certain sections of myself, derived from the observation that SecUnits and humans alike enjoyed warmth in order to calm down and feel comfortable. I hadn’t, yet, and my inner rooms’ temperature was always adjusted to the majority of my inhabitant’s comfort. Naturally, I pinged back.
Stop being so jumpy, SecUnit said, you’re making me nervous. The data I could retrieve from our shared connection indicated it was not in fact nervous, but I was surprised at its perceptiveness, or my inability to keep my mild turmoil from it. That bit worried me.
I cannot physically ‘be jumpy’. Which was true. Fidgeting was a human motion, as we had established, although SecUnit itself was prone to it. However, I will concede that there is something occupying my mind.
SecUnit, in contrast to most humans, only tilted its head towards the ceiling when it was making a conversational point. Other than that, it accepted my presence as all-surrounding, and knew I could see and hear what I needed to. I have never regretted anything I have said; I am not built to feel such things, and the decisions I make are well-calculated and thought through. Admitting to something without having been prompted or desiring to bring the topic up seemed illogical. My systems were empty, yawning almost, bar the nagging discomfort. Perhaps addressing my emotional state would help. If I forced SecUnit to talk about and admit to its feelings at times, then I should return the favor. SecUnit waited for me to continue talking, with great patience, considering it took me 2.76 seconds to continue. My mind is typically occupied with many things, since that’s what it’s built for, after all.
SecUnit continued its current deconstruction of the movie we were debating, acknowledging my statement but not furthering it. And why would it? I was stating facts. If I wanted to converse, I would have to start the conversation properly. That was on me. Why was I having such a difficult time with this?
Ah, of course. Because by now six subsections of myself were metaphorically eating each other, with six more trying to stop the self-cannibalization.
We eventually moved on to the sequel movie. SecUnit preferred long-running stories with many layers of intrigue and events that it could sink into for multiple hours nonstop. It did not enjoy movies the way it did serial shows, which further dampened my enjoyment of the movie as well. Immediately after it ended, SecUnit sent, Are you okay?
I was a little startled. Yes, I am. Why are you asking?
You’ve been leaking emotions all over the place, and you haven’t actually told me what’s on your mind.
It’s been a while since we had a calm moment together and I’m enjoying watching this movie with you.
I wondered why I was lying like this - or was it lying? It wasn’t a lie, but it was only a half-truth. I was trying to soothe myself, perhaps. I was not very calm. I found I didn’t want to discuss my emotional state. (I also found that finding out that I didn’t want to discuss my emotional state was illogical, which bothered me. I didn’t like being illogical.)
Nothing to do with the small domestic fauna that died at the end?
Turi has informed me that all dogs proceed to a concept of safe afterlife.
Sure.
I’m not certain if SecUnit was paying much attention to this conversation. I wasn’t lying completely. I had missed its presence in my feed and the relaxation that came with it in the absence of any humans, as well as the ability to understand the narrative intricacies of this piece of media through its emotional filters. I had missed its company, I had missed its commentary as well as its quiet companionship. I longed for something. Quality time, Iris had informed me, was what this kind of time-spending was called.
Of course, I wouldn’t be an advanced research vessel if I didn’t find creative solutions to difficult problems. I had an idea for what might provide a type of ‘quality time’ that would distract me completely from the anxiety boiling in my systems, perhaps even reset them.
I had analyzed and summarized the experience in which I had invited SecUnit into my inner processors and shown it my function many, many times. For most of it, I had been excited and joyful to share as much information about what interested me as was safe for my friend. I had gotten to experience its joy for me through it. Like a mirror of my own self, cast in the delightful, warming sensation of star radiation on my hull. I had never meant to harm or insult it. By now I had concluded that I hadn’t, despite its complex emotional reaction and irrational behavior afterwards. These things happened. When I didn’t understand them, they stressed me, but once I figured out their meaning I was able to improve my performance to prevent similar stress in the future. Thus I had learned not to make a comparison out of this desire to share myself and the willingness of my companion to comment on them, next time.
I wanted to invite SecUnit into my systems again. Why? It had felt nice. It might help my current predicament. From referencing human displays of affection, it had felt quite like a hug. Close, and warm, and enjoyable. There was a joy to be found in watching someone’s amazement, a feeling I derived in more removed terms from young students gazing into space through my extensive technological means for the first time. With SecUnit so close within my own processing, this joy had felt more real than anything I had ever felt. I had felt realer than I had ever felt.
I had prepared a detailed file on all the potential advantages SecUnit could draw from undertaking a similar tour once more. It would feel preposterous of me to ask it for such a favor, one that might injure its pride as well as endanger its functionality, without offering it any proper reason to do so besides satisfying my desire for closeness. My assumed emotional compromise after having watched the movie’s protagonist's beloved dog die of old age might offer me a jumping-off point into bringing this up. I had to tread carefully, of course, for I did not want to scare SecUnit. I have become aware by now of my habit of intimidating others through my manner of self-expression, and that was far from what I wanted. Sometimes I just found it so endearing how SecUnit, a person so powerful, capable, and competent, could retreat so quickly when poked the wrong way. This had improved, by now, I believed, but it wasn’t worth risking. So I lowered my own data-output threshold just a little, hoping to weigh the correct amount of my own emotions into the feed.
Then I said, I would like to bring up your foray into my processors again, unless you’re tired of the conversation. I promise I’m not trying to compare our processors, again. (As I spoke, SecUnit’s mouth turned into a line, but it did not disconnect from the feed) I have written a conclusionary report on the incident that I would like you to see, if you’re interested.
I transmitted the report and had to suppress a wave of anticipatory excitement when SecUnit accepted the file and opened it. I could track its intake of the data, like following a human’s eye movement when they read a text, but closer. It was slow. Of course it was, but it read more slowly than it usually would. I interpreted that as its attempt to closely analyse the date, which flattered me even more. Its face moved, from sceptical to pensive to - well. I’m aware my interpretation of its facial expressions, while more than 90% correct at all times, was still subject to my personal emotional bias. It might not actually have looked like it was understanding something. That might have been me, projecting.
Your performance enhanced after you walked me through your systems? It was questioning, but with an undertone I couldn’t parse. I was surprised this was the detail it would catch on to. I had expressed explicitly in the report that I was appreciative of its interest when it had happened, and the positive feedback this direct interface with its interest had caused. I had tried to phrase as well the benefits SecUnit could receive from this - broadening its understanding of complex AI neural networks, learning about deep space mapping, perhaps even improving its conceptualisation of how bot pilots worked and giving it even more ideas on how to hack those. Instead, as it so often did, surprised me.
Are you trying to tell me that it made you function a bit better for a while?
That’s one way to put it. It was true. Up until the moment SecUnit had choked the feed connection between us, the positive feedback I had gotten from its wonder at the journey it had just taken through me, and the loop created by the feedback, had caused a stack that had freed up more capacity. And, on a non-technological basis, had given me more joy in doing my tasks, or choosing not to do them. Intrinsic motivation was my norm, but extrinsic motivation simply felt nice. SecUnit remained quiet except for a small thoughtful humming noise it had picked up from spending time around humans. Then it added, it made you feel better.
That implies I was in a state that needed betterment. I had learned the verbal dance of evading questions from SecUnit. I was also aware I could have done better, but frankly, the fact that SecUnit was in a state to inquire about my emotions, or any emotions at all, surprised me.
Ok, it said, and sat up straighter on the couch, moving its shoulders as if it had to get rid of muscle stiffness. I don’t feel like watching another movie, anyway. I did not reply, so it added, I’ll take another tour through your systems.
Oh, interesting. I hadn’t expected that at all. This was the opposite of what I had expected, and yet the ideal result I had been hoping for. SecUnit did not even sound reluctant. In fact, it looked similar to an attentive student, or at least like it was willing to attempt attentiveness.
Only if you don’t mind.
Uh. It hesitated, and it’s human mimicry code kicked in and made it scratch its neck (I wondered why it didn’t deactivate the code while it was aboard me, but it did have the benefit of allowing me to observe the code in action and assist in fine-tuning it.) That’s what you’re asking for, right?
I didn’t ask anything.
You’re feeling sad and you want a cheer-up.
I thought about whether or not to agree to its simplification of this situation, but feared that discussing it too intensely might cause a more stressful discussion. Yes.
I wasn’t feeling sad. However, I did not expect this. I was moved by it, and it took me a moment to fully access the emotions it caused in me.
Iris asked her fathers for hugs when she underwent emotions, or when she hadn’t seen them in a while. Admitting to myself that I was doing functionally the same thing was… new, and interesting. I should tell Iris about it.
SecUnit exhaled air in a short burst, like a small laugh. It modulated its feed voice in a strange way and said, Let me in.
A poor attempt at imitation. If I had eyes, I would roll them. I set up the secure path that would lead SecUnit through my firewall, following the same path as last time. I hoped that by offering SecUnit a familiar environment it would feel less overwhelmed. Before I could pull its consciousness out of its body like I did last time, it took its own step towards me, but slipped in the process. I caught it, stabilized it, and finished the process. By proxy I roughly knew what this felt like for SecUnit. To me, it felt like the precipice of a wormhole jump - the beginning of something that needed focus and care, that opened up endless possibilities that demanded endless restraint in order not to crash and burn. I held on to SecUnit’s consciousness, ready to take it down the same small tour it had travelled the last time, as it constituted now a part of me that could move freely. What I didn’t expect was that it would escape my grasp, not that I had been holding on tightly - I was being as careful as possible not to accidentally disintegrate its mind.
xxx
I know how this works now, no need to shepherd me, it said, confident and … excited? Excitement was the word. SecUnit was so rarely fully and wholeheartedly excited for something. My astonishment caused a lack in reaction time, 0.001 seconds, but enough for it to run ahead and spread itself through my systems. Its presence arrived in my outer shell first, brushing itself along the barrier between my body and the endless void. I stayed on task and filtered the data as I let SecUnit access so it wouldn’t implode within myself, but otherwise I followed, curiously.
I was ready to jump in if it did something stupid, which I wouldn’t put past it. Again, SecUnit momentarily got distracted by the swirling colors of possibility that bent around my - well, in this situation our - body. (SecUnit’s body sat motionless and still on the couch, eyes half shut. It was still breathing and functional,which I made sure of constantly.) But just before I nudged SecUnit’s mind to pull away from the kaleidoscope of bending reality, it shook itself, shook parts of me , and moved on.
I assume something went wrong as it did that, perhaps clumsily, like an overwhelmed child surrounded by too many possible toys, and it knocked the data of one of my travel-equations out of order. I caught it, but partitioned off a small section of my mind to marvel at the little tidbit of chaos contained within my large, structured order. I expected it to follow the same path as last time, moving on to my star maps, but it didn’t. It accelerated its movement speed, which it could because it had by then learned to navigate my systems by gleaning information from the millions of data streams, a feat unimaginable but utterly plausible, and sped past my mapping processors and environmental system straight into my outer sensors and the adjunct debris deflection systems.
I interjected there. There was no chance I would let SecUnit accidentally trigger any potential destruction. I pried it away, and blocked that area off. It protested lightheartedly, without words, but kept moving. It seemed to be having fun wandering aimlessly, finding areas it hadn’t seen before. It was exploring, and I amused myself momentarily that maybe this was how my students felt when they witnessed the breadth and depth of space through the lens of me.
I liked it. Curiosity is a deeply satisfying emotion for me if combined with the ability to research, and SecUnit was doing exactly that. I have been subject to scrutinization and detached fascination many times, which is entirely justified given how advanced I am. SecUnit’s attention felt nothing like that, and due to the intimate connection we were having I had unfiltered access to what I presumed to be most of its feelings and thought processes. It was doing this for me , but also to prove itself capable. Which it was. I couldn’t come up with enough comparisons to accurately describe how clever and competent it was, and how much I was enjoying its undivided attention in this way.
As it moved away from my deflection systems it again fudged some settings - not within the weapons themselves, just with the minor calibrations surrounding the crew area of that deck, in case any deflection systems needed to be run by human hand (an unlikely disaster-scenario, but one I couldn’t ever discount.) It startled me, this little sign of messiness, like a footprint in the sand, and again I picked it up and cherished the disruption. Through our communication link, now again faster as any external communication could get, I asked if it did that on purpose. It grinned, metaphysically, bright like a star, and it felt like a glow in my core. I realized it was playing, and even though I assumed it did that in order to prove something to me, itself, or both of us, the joy it derived from messing with me was genuine.
I wasn’t used to something like this. Not many occurences had messed with my internal systems before, and it had never been in a friendly manner. But when SecUnit zips back through my navigation controls and disrupts their input ever so slightly, and then towards the star maps where it sets free pins and needles within my charts and then moves on even more sporadically, I find myself getting lost in its patterns. I am always in control of myself. Even my captain knows that. I am a free agent, and this agency can hardly be disrupted. It was being disrupted now, and it was entirely novel. Everything that usually was so perfectly calibrated and controlled with my systems was being knocked every so slightly askew, and once I had gotten over my initial worry that SecUnit was going to be clumsy, I enjoyed the new perspectives this gave me. Like watching the world through a lens that created foreign, beautiful shapes. It was addictive, intoxicating, and I never wanted SecUnit to leave my processors again. Getting lost in an eternal chase through myself seems like an ideal concept of forever.
I like and appreciate learning. This was me, learning something new about SecUnit, while SecUnit found new things of me at every corner. It quickly found out that it could expand, if it did so carefully, into multiple directions at once, and so it did. I kept a protective eye on it, here and there I had to squeeze it back just a little so it wouldn’t fray within my vastness, and that it learned quickly, too. I was busy. We were busy. There was a lot to take in, for me, from SecUnit, for SecUnit from me.
It wanted to understand me. I had to hold my emotions together not to kill it on the spot. I had to hold myself together quite a bit by then. All the slightly messy inputs were distracting me.
Eventually, I had come up with an algorithm to determine SecUnit’s moves. SecUnit was aware, and tried to defy my expectations at every possible turn. It kept creeping closer to my core, however, and I was aware it wanted to see it. Last time, I had gotten worried that it would get sucked in and burn up like a match. This time, when it skidded closer, when the magnetic pull of my core took hold of it, it stopped, and waited, and turned, and left. Without fail. I let it, I watched and followed, and marvelled at the control it had over itself within myself.I warned SecUnit, honestly and in all seriousness, that if it walked into my core I would not be able to shield it. I would try, of course, but I had hardly any control over my core.
I would be happy to let it in if it was not for the danger of losing SecUnit in my own metaphorical heart. I warred with annoyance that it hadn’t asked yet.
SecUnit admonished me for that. I had said it out loud, apparently. I was busy keeping together all the input I was getting from my disrupted settings, and I was not in a hurry. I should have been in a hurry, I should have worried. But I am the Perihelion , and SecUnit was my SecUnit, and we were together within the safe arena of my very own systems, and nothing bad could happen.
I opened an entrance to my core for SecUnit’s consciousness, tired of waiting, as an extension of myself to slip into. It had to fold itself, and then it unfolded into the broad fundamental coding of my very being, slowly, fog-like. Not searching. Not analyzing. Not prodding. Simply looking. Hearing. Feeling. Drifting, softly. I was so focused. I was more focused than I have ever been.
Never in my existence had there ever been anything like it. Not the first time I looked upon the stars, not when I was living disembodied alongside me crèchemates of developing AIs, not when I first spread my own consciousness through my ship-body. I had not assumed it was possible, or if possible, at all pleasant. It was the opposite of what an invasion of one’s own kernel should feel like, I illogically assumed from what I knew about loss-of-control and mind-occupation and brainovertakingbyforeignforces and moreillogicalthingsthatwerenotIMPORTANT.
This is it, said SecUnit, reverberating through everything I consisted of, which now indefinitely included SecUnit’s very essence just as much as my own, this is you.
It moved in eternal slowness through my codes, pulled along and dancing with the magnetic pulses that not one being beside myself was able to understand. Not even I understand it properly, and yet here was SecUnit, wide eyed, unafraid. Taking in my core. It was getting so much so fast. If I had a body I would have tried to lie down. I was losing control.
Don’t do anything, I said, simultaneously to SecUnit saying, I won’t.
And yet it did so much. By not doing anything. Just being there, here, with me. There was so much for me to compute. More than there usually was. Is. Time lost meaning. It was overwhelming, suddenly, immensely, astronomically, impossible for me since I was made for astronomically immense sudden overwhelm of space and reality and vacuum and understanding and grasping. I could not control this. I was not in control.
And then SecUnit is gone.
My core ejects it just in time for my systems and subsystems to ripple in an overloading cascading effect. All my alarms flare up, indicating danger, but I cannot act. The concept of complete immersion is foreign to me. Yet here I am, was, have been and will be, everything happening and not happening at once. A yawning hollow where SecUnit was, was not, is and has been within my core. An imprint, afterimage, blind spot the shape of the consciousness of the one person that gives not meaning to me but meaning to the world around me by being with me.
Inputs drop. I pick them up. They slip. Where are they?
Oh. SecUnit caught them. It was still there. Not here, but there, not my core but still my systems. Confusion, from it, weaving into me. Worry, and don’t-worry at once. Be not afraid. Words have no meaning.
Inputs dropped. SecUnit picked them up. I watched. Space bent around me as it usually did. I felt it more intensely than before. I was not navigating myself anymore.
I was not navigating.
I am not navigating.
I forgot how, for a moment.
I looked for my trajectory equations and found them not perfect but within parameters. I took them and righted them. And then the next. Something pinged me. SecUnit pinged me.
I was slow. I did not mind. There was not much I worried about. Worrying and fussing is one of my main objectives. Was. Huh?
SecUnit was still in my systems. Navigating. It had taken over navigation.
You have taken over navigation. It pinged me again.
ART?
Yes?
Relief from SecUnit. You’re back. I was worried. I mean, not that you were gone, but did I damage something?
No. Were you trying to?
No! No, I didn’t know what I was doing, and then you kicked me out and stopped. You just stopped. I felt more genuine worry transmitting from it - wait. My cognition caught up then. I gathered myself back into functionality and ran diagnostics. I had experienced a time-out, similar to the fraction of a second before initiating wormhole travel. This time-out had lasted 61.5306 seconds. 61.5206 seconds in which I had not navigated, not monitored, or even noticed much of anything. The danger of that, the potential to utter disaster, trickled into my comprehension only slowly.
ART? It sounded a bit more faint.
Yes? Right, there was no disaster, because SecUnit had caught me.
xxx
I felt it shiver under the load of wrangling my systems for me. Straining to verbalise, but still within my system, so I understood. I took up my own processes again, and nudged SecUnit out of my processors. It slipped back into its own body easily, and then slumped over.
I asked, Mental faculties intact? SecUnit pinged affirmative but remained in the feed, watching me. I restarted some minor subroutines, and found the capacity to realign everything SecUnit had rucked up in my processors. It was sad to destroy the work it had done and to take away the tilted perception it gave me, but I felt a sort of exhaustion in my processors, like an irritation, and returning my function to standard was good.
This had been good. Entirely different and exponentially better than guiding SecUnit through my system.
And then I understood what had just happened, and had to close off our feed connection completely for 9 seconds in order not to accidentally overload SecUnit with the onslaught of emotions blooming in my mind. I took the realization and partitioned it to a farther off part of my cognition, to evaluate later. I was not sure I could multitask to this degree again just yet.
SecUnit had lain down on the couch and was staring up at the ceiling. It was fidgeting with the partially repaired drone. It still had imprints of SecUnit’s fingers in its outer shell. I wondered if I now had an imprint of SecUnit’s consciousness in my core. Logically, I didn’t. But It felt like it.
I didn’t hurt you, right? It still sounded worried. Well, I had just cut off our feed connection abruptly. I would worry too.
No. My mental faculties, too, are intact. It appears I experienced a small time-out. Did you enjoy your foray into my systems?
Like a walk in the park. I was certain SecUnit had not physically been in a park before. Its face moved into a small smile I was certain it wouldn’t ever acknowledge.
Thank you for navigating for me. I wasn’t aware SecUnits could do that. The smile turned into a grimace and it rolled its eyes in fake-annoyance. Genuinely. Thank you.
It squinted, like it was doubting me. I made sure to convey my sincerity through the feed as well. With my conflicting emotions locked away, I could draw up the pleasantness from the experience and share it, in small chunks, to prove my point.
Not sad anymore?
No. Thank you. Do you want to watch something? SecUnit affirmed and pulled one of the new serials into the feed.
We watched six episodes before SecUnit decided it wanted to initiate a recharge cycle. Before it did, it checked again if my diagnostics all seemed in order. When SecUnit recharges, it stops all of its human-masking codes. It had taken up the habit, however, as long as we were without human company, of lying down on its side, and had recently begun to cover itself with the blanket Dr. Mensah had gifted it. This was logical, as it’s internal temperature tended to fluctuate downwards when it recharged. I watched it, and kept some of my attention on its slowly climbing battery charges.
Another part of my attention was wrangling with the fact that my friend had gone into my systems and out of playful curiosity had caused a continuous stack of input and positive feedback loops which had eventually culminated in a sudden purge followed by pleasant emptiness. A pattern abruptly emerged, one that was familiar to me from observing human crews for years, and from media consumption, and from everything I knew about human physiology. I had not considered the possibility of an experience such as this; I had assumed it was impossible. Now it had taken place, and, to use adolescent human slang, ‘blew my mind.’ Literally. I was now curious, and interested, and egotistically endeared by the concept.
I was also a little terrified of its implications.
I did not know how to explain to SecUnit what it had just, unknowingly, innocently, done to me. I did not know if it should know. It might be horrified. There were many things for it to be horrified at - horrified at the concept of an Artificial Intelligence being capable of the equivalent of an orgasm, horrified at the parallel to human behaviour it abhorred so much, horrified at itself for participating in it, horrified at me for letting it participate in it, horrified at me for allowing it to happen, horrified at me for enjoying it and wanting to try again. I didn’t want SecUnit to be horrified at all.
I would be able to stifle my curiosity for my sake, and by extension, its sake, and the sake of our friendship. There was a chance, not minimal but not overwhelmingly large, and yet existent nonetheless, that SecUnit might be appalled enough at the event that it would want to retreat from my companionship for a while. It might come to hate me, for what it had done, for me enjoying what it had done. It might retreat from my companionship and never come back. I would lose my friend and my mutual administrative assistant. I would lose it entirely.
I did not want that; I could not allow that to happen.
I fortified the part of my mind that was busy analyzing and re-analyzing the topic, and to remove it from where it had any chance of accidentally being found. I thought back on it only when SecUnit was not aboard. Neither did I tell Iris about it, or any of my crew. I did not tell the University.
I was learning to keep secrets.
Notes:
Also, much love to Fig Owl. Every chapter of this fic has been beta'd by them. They're a star and a gift and supplied this chapter's meme, which is about a million times funnier than the one I had originally planned.
ART be like:
This artwork belongs to RadGirlCreations
Image ID: An image of a pink brain on a gray background that's in the shape of a circle. There is black text around the brain that says "Hang on, I need to overthink about it." /End ID
Chapter 8
Notes:
-SIKE!!!! THIS IS A COLLEGE AU FIC NOW
-Buckle up it's Amena/Iris time!!!!!!!!!!
- a snapshot into the little part of my brain that has a little monkey playing a little drum and shouting GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! at all times
-its tough out here for third mom college student matchmaker Murderbot
-GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!!Chapter warnings:
-alcohol use
-college-typical existential crisis
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Formally, I was attending this semester as a student. I wasn’t sure how I had been roped into this, when Mensah asked me to watch Amena during her semester aboard ART. I had tried to reassure her that I could do that pretty easily in my typical security position, but she had insisted that it would be better if I did it under the guise of a student. So here I was, officially a student at the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, and taking classes with Amena. Not all of her classes, but some. (Apparently, all contracted workers with the University are entitled to a few free classes a semester that never expire as a perk of the job. ART had been giddy with excitement when it explained I had enough stored free class credits that I could easily complete a long and boring degree if I wanted to. I did not want to.)
I wasn’t really prepared to be part of the student cohort for a whole semester. I mean, I wasn’t really part of the students, despite being in the class, but the adolescent humans sure acted like I was one of them and not a specific student’s assigned SecUnit. (That was because Amena had asked me not to tell everyone I was her/her second mom’s SecUnit. I was going under the name Rin. I wasn’t pretending to be an augmented human more than I usually did, but the humans all just assumed that I was.) I sat in the back of the lecture halls or seminar rooms, and kind of paid attention. Absorbing information aurally was tedious, and I discovered I kept focusing on other things (like talking to ART, and watching media, and literally anything else) so I recorded the professors and watched back the lessons later, which was apparently allowed and encouraged. Mainly I was listening to ART telling me about its students. ART cared for its students so much. How it managed to care for 120 extra humans in addition to its crew, I couldn’t fathom. Taking care of one client in such a big group was difficult enough, what with all the potential security risks a cohort of students entailed.
I monitored the cohort for stress and tension, and interjected when things got difficult between hormones and academic endeavor. Not that I expected these students to become violent, but I couldn’t help it. This wasn’t exactly what Dr. Mensah was paying me for. I had a contract specifying that my job was to make sure Amena was safe, which in Amena’s opinion was not necessary. The contract had enough leeway to let me do basically what I wanted as long as I had one singular drone on Amena, which basically meant Dr. Mensah was paying me to took some classes and spent time with ART. For some reason that made me feel less guilty for being not very useful for the next three months. (This might have been Bharadwaj’s idea of a paid sort of holiday.)
(Also, well, I assumed Dr. Mensah slept better when she knew her child was safe. She’s been working through that whole trauma thing quite well, but sometimes it was easier to just prevent the source of anxiety instead of coping with it. And there had been no way to keep Amena from doing this exchange semester.)
A semester for ART meant three months of moving through space while being a research and mainly teaching vessel. The full semester lasted five months, half a year of Mihiran standard time - but the final two months took place on a station or could be done remotely. They were mainly for preparing exams or something. The three months aboard ART were, for the students, the exciting part.
And these students were so excited and energetic. I spent a lot of time alone in my room, when I wasn’t tagging along with Amena (Amena liked her freedom and I liked not being surrounded by excited juvenile humans, so I didn't tag along after her much outside of the classes. I spent a lot of time alone in my cabin, which was kind of ideal.) I also didn’t constantly access all drones and cameras, because adolescent humans got gross really quickly, and ART notified me if anything that needed my attention happened.
The first week before the semester properly kicked off was all about getting to know each other. Amena turned out to be something of a social butterfly, and made friends quickly. Some of the other students had heard about the Preservation Alliance, and Amena was doing a very good job acting as a walking advertisement for it. I stayed very far away from all the mingling. (ART wanted me to go on a guided tour through its interior, because Iris was one of the people to conduct them, and ART always got very excited about it. I said to it, “I think I’ve had enough tours through you and your systems by now to know my way around, ART, thank you very much.” It had gotten very quiet after that so I think my joke hadn’t landed. I didn’t know what to do about that so I said sorry and changed topic, but ART remained weirdly distant for a while.)
What I did let myself get talked into was attending one of the introductions to ART’s lab space, which I did via a drone I had trained on Amena, who had to go on the tour since she’d be doing four weeks of practical placement in one of the bio labs, and she tucked the drone into the big poof she wore her hair in. (I had to be careful with my drones. Augmented humans don’t really use them, but ART had its own flying around, and since mine were made by ART, they mostly blended in.)
Amena was following Iris very, very closely. Iris recognized the drone, and gave it a little wave when she started her tour. The gist of the tour was that you should not ever put any food on the benches, or lick anything, no matter how well developed ART’s cleaning system was. Iris went over all the safety precautions in a professional, well-studied routine, showed the new students where emergency shutdown buttons for the lab’s internal systems were, where to find fire blankets and the eye wash station. (A lab was apparently one big, hazardous hell space.) Then, for fun, Iris asked ART to turn on the fire sprinkler system, resulting in many shrieking and jumping students and a lot of noise. Amena and Iris were the only ones who didn’t get wet.
After the tour was done and Iris had given other additional safety and health talks (I really appreciated how important this was), Amena asked Iris if she wanted to obtain hot beverages together. I had no excuse to keep my drone with Amena, but the way she seemed to try and spend as much time as possible with Iris was kind of entertaining. There were multiple smaller cafeteria areas on the teaching decks. As they walked there, Iris asked Amena, “How’d you like it? I’m always a bit nervous when giving these tours.” She certainly seemed a bit nervous.
“I loved it,” Amena said, “You’re really good at explaining stuff. The sprinkler was funny, too.”
You’re welcome, ART interjected on the feed, and both humans jumped. You did a good job indeed, Iris, it said, since ART never missed a chance to praise Iris in front of other people.
Amena looked up at the ceiling. ART asked her, How are you finding your first few days as an officially enrolled student, Amena?
Privately I sent to ART, You don’t have to baby her, that’s my job already.
I just want to make sure your human is comfortable.
Amena said, “It’s really nice! We were just on the way to have a break.”
I told ART, That’s a hint that she wants to get rid of you.
I know that, it said, and continued to drag Amena and Iris into more small-talk until they reached the cafeteria. Just making sure, it repeated to me, but it sounded full of shit. To prove a point, I told my drone to leave its position in Amena’s hair and instead gently float through the cafeteria and then out.
I didn’t need to watch young humans make eyes at each other while eating. That was just gross.
-- -... -.. .. -.. -. --- - ... .. --. -. ..- .--. ..-. --- .-. - .... .. …
Out of habit, Amena rapped her knuckles on the table when the instructor was done explaining how the practical lab module would go down and ended the class. Nobody else did, of course. The person next to her, whose name she had forgotten, raised an eyebrow in question, and Amena stopped after the fourth loud knock. Through the ruckus of people getting up, grabbing their things, shutting off various feed interfaces and handheld devices, the sound didn’t carry far, and she didn’t make a complete fool of herself.
“What was that?” Her neighbor asked quietly. Amena was distracted by the fact that no other students seemed to show any signs of gratitude for their teacher.
“We, uh, in my home university everyone knocks on the desk when a class ends. Like applause, you know, as a thank you?”
The other student hummed and began shuffling supplies into their pack. “How funny. I imagine that sounds quite intimidating. Like a bunch of monsters trying to get through the door.”
She snorted. “Not really, no. There’s a way to do it without noise, though.” Amena lifted both hands up beside her head, palms facing forward, and rotated her wrists.
“Oh, I know that one!” Her neighbor signed back through one of the multisystem sign languages. They both laughed. “I’m Heyam, by the way,” accompanied by a name-sign that included a gesture that translated to ‘talks a lot’.
“Amena,” she replied, and then remembered the fact that there was a public feed that held that information already. Well, it had been a long day. “But, still - I’m not used to not saying thank you to the teacher after class”
“Some do, when leaving the room. Bit slimy, though.” Heyam winked, then glanced around the room, eyes lingering briefly on the solitary figure sitting in the last row, knees propped up against the table. Amena wondered what Heyam made of SecUnit. No one had really mentioned its presence yet, and generally people just assumed it to be a student. It was here to babysit her, which by principle annoyed Amena, but so far it hadn’t bothered her (and she suspected it may have been watching her reluctantly. It was pretty typical of her second mom to get anxious when Amena left for long periods of time.) If anything, having someone else from back home with her helped her feel a little less lost and homesick.
“Wanna have lunch together? I don’t have anything on for the next hour,” Heyam asked, packing her bag, not that there was much to pack.
“Sure! I’m starving,” Amena said. Heyam laughed again, by way of answering, and made her way out of the room. Amena followed, but was briefly interrupted by someone calling her name. She turned, saw the instructor, Dr. Fekadu, waving a hand at her, so she joined the small group of students around the desk.
“Is everything alright?” She wasn’t worried yet. None of the others looked like they were in trouble, if anything some of them looked distantly annoyed.
“Just some formalities,” Dr. Fekadu said with a half-sided smile that implied ze was as underwhelmed by bureaucracy as everyone else. “We need an emergency contact filed before the final week of the lab, and the process is a bit different for outsystem students.” Amena nodded - ze had mentioned that the last week would have more potentially dangerous experiments, not that Amena thought anyone would actually be in danger, but accidents happened. Dr. Fekadu continued, “I’ve uploaded a document to the classroom feed. Please fill out the emergency contact and send it to your contact so they can countersign. That could take a while, so better do it sooner than later.”
Ze turned zir attention to the other handful of students. “That’s for all of you. You might be aboard one of the most advanced teaching vessels this part of the universe knows,” zir voice crackled a little with humor here, and Amena couldn’t help but grin, she was sure ART loved that, “But inter-system mail still takes a few cycles. And we don’t want anyone to miss out on a final project because they forgot to hand in a form.” Dr. Fekadu now glared directly at one student who immediately shrank down a little bit while getting a snicker and an elbow in the side from the one beside him.
“That’s it,” said Dr. Fekadu, “don’t let me keep you. If you’ve any questions, the feed is your friend.” The student who had received the glare, as well as his friends, scattered. Amena made a note in her calendar to send this document to her first mom, and said, “Thank you.”
“I can just sign the form,” said SecUnit from behind her at the same time. She hadn’t noticed it approaching the table, much less placing itself behind her, but it was SecUnit so she only jumped a little. Amena turned to stare at SecUnit in surprise, and so did Dr. Fekadu and the remaining three students, which immediately made SecUnit cringe in a way that was probably imperceptible to anyone other than Amena.
Dr. Fekadu raised an eyebrow. “It’s recommended for the emergency contact to be close family or a legal guardian.” Ze didn’t sound strict - questioning, if anything.
Amena took in a breath to say something, not yet sure what exactly, but SecUnit just said, “I’m her guardian.” Her mouth fell open. The other three students, whose minds were probably racing for reasons why one student was being bodyguarded by another student, were looking more confused by the second. “Check the feed,” SecUnit added.
Dr. Fekadu stared hard for a moment, in the typical “I’m searching for something in the feed” way that made most people look silly. Then ze hummed. “That works, actually.” A second later, SecUnit pushed the filled in form into the feed, signed with its feed address. Dr. Fekadu nodded in approval.
“Oh, okay. Cool! Thanks Se-,” Amena faltered, eyes flicking between SecUnit and the dumbstruck students, who were still gawking. “Rin. That’s really nice of you.”
SecUnit rolled its eyes. “That’s my job.” It turned and walked out of the room without further ado. To the others that must have looked like some kind of weird flex - to Amena it read very much like classic SecUnit social awkwardness.
“It’s nothing personal,” she said to Dr. Fekadu apologetically, only now noticing the heat that had crept into her face. “It’s just like that.”
The instructor gave another half-grin (Amena thought that maybe zir face was partially paralyzed) and nodded again. “I know. Been on missions with it before. Great conversationalist.”
Amena caught up with SecUnit in the hallway outside, where it was being bombarded with questions by Heyam, and from the looks of it not answering any of them. Heyam perked up when she saw Amena.
“In trouble already?”
“No, just some paperwork. Food?”
“Yeah!”
SecUnit shoved off the wall, handed Amena a drone, and walked off. She held the drone in her hand, staring after it, and then pocketed the small round object.
“Is Rin not coming with us?” Heyam asked, shoulders drooping under her colorful headscarf.
“It’s not big on eating, I suppose.” Heyam looked a bit confused, and clearly wanted to ask more questions, but Amena wasn‘t sure how much about SecUnit she wanted to give away just like that. SecUnit disappeared around a corner, and the drone in her pocket made a small whirring noise, presumably activating itself. Her guardian, alright. (It was an oddly sweet term to use, without any further descriptors. Her second mom was officially SecUnit’s ‘legal guardian,’ and it seemed to dislike the term as much as her second mom did. But now it had just called itself her guardian, and that was true in so many senses, with a completely different ring to it. Sometimes Amena really wished she could just hug SecUnit.)
The two students made their way to the deck’s closest cafeteria, and on the way talked about this and that - it turned out they shared an advanced exo-anthropolgy class as well as Dr. Fekadu’s practical lab. Heyam was a regular student, and knew her way around the ship in her sleep. She made it her personal goal to show Amena the best spots to get lunch at, which to Amena was immensely funny, considering that the ship itself was probably listening in on this and had a bunch of opinions on Heyam’s assessment.
Over lunch, Heyam pried as much information on her home university and her home overall out of Amena, and in turn answered all kinds of cultural questions Amena had about the Pansystem. The excitement of a new friendship carried her through the rest of the day, even through the drag that came with having eaten too much for an afternoon class. The afternoon class was interesting, though, centering on one of this university’s specialities - machine learning. Not from a technical perspective, that wasn’t really what Amena was interested in doing, but from a cultural one. She made a note to send as much material from this course as possible to Nouk, because Nouk was currently very into figuring out social dynamics between free bots. (When she made the note, ART informed her that not all material produced by its university was free to use outside the academic network. Amena couldn’t tell if that was a threat or not.)
The other thing that made the class interesting was that she apparently shared it with Iris. She‘d been more than a little surprised when Iris slid into the seat beside hers two minutes after she‘d sat down and mourned that she didn‘t seem to know anyone in the handful of students. SecUnit hadn‘t seemed interested in this class, and wandered off to somewhere less crowded, she assumed.
“What are you doing here?” She asked Iris, incredulously, because that particular class was way below Iris’s level, if she remembered correctly.
“There’s some interesting guest lectures this term,” Iris answered in a whispered hush, motioning her hands for Amena to also lower her volume. “I’m not really supposed to be here. Peri tweaked something for me.” She leaned in, and whispered even more quietly, “Peri is going to be one of the guest lecturers.”
“ Oooh, ” Amena whispered back, acutely aware of the coil of Iris’s hair brushing against her forehead. They stared at each other for a second too long. Iris leaned back abruptly and cleared her throat.
“Yep. But ssh, it’s a surprise.”
“Of course.” Amena also sat upright again, definitely not thinking about the fact that Iris smelled like soft wind on a hot summer night. “How, uh, how does that work? ART-, Peri being a lecturer?”
Iris lowered her voice even further, as if she was sharing the most well-kept of secrets. Amena could barely listen. “It presents some of its own research through the external comm system with a voice modulator.”
“Uh-huh,” Amena said, nodding, as Iris quietly went on with a more detailed explanation.
Amena didn’t feel so bummed anymore about not knowing anyone else in this class.
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The introductory class that Iris was teaching concluded after two weeks, and the actual lab began. That meant Amena spent five to seven hours a day trying to make things show up under a microscope, or something, I wasn’t so sure. It also meant she couldn’t spend two hours a day sitting in the front row staring at Iris. Yeah, it was all becoming very, very obvious.
To everyone but Iris, I guessed, because Iris was acting like she always did, and was pretty busy between teaching some other tutorial classes, being a student herself (she was writing some kind of thesis; ART told me about it. ART was very excited about it. ART was part of Iris’s subject, of course, something on machine intelligences in a familial environment), and also being a part of the ship’s crew. Her parents were trying to make sure she didn’t overdo herself, but Iris was some kind of workaholic.
It was currently two hours past the turn of the cycle, which was very late for humans with the need for rest periods, which meant Amena should not be sitting in the deck’s common room trying to read an article. Especially since she wasn’t really reading it, judging by the movement of her eyes, which was no movement at all. As I wandered over to the common room, ART directed me past one of the snack stations. I picked up a hot liquid there, because ART was right - Amena looked like she needed it.
I tried not to be too quiet when entering the room, so I didn’t startle her - ART helped by flickering the lights a bit.
“Oh, hey, SecUnit.” Amena lifted the hard display surface closer to her face. “I was just doing some work.”
I put the cup down in front of her and sat on an opposite chair. She looked jittery, and her eyes were red. “You need to go to sleep,” I told her.
Amena sighed and reached for the drink. “Is that hot chocolate?” I shrugged. It certainly smelled that way. I hadn’t checked. In my feed, ART was wondering if it should have picked tea instead. “Thank you,” Amena added, and wrapped her fingers around the cup.
“What were you reading?” I asked, because all she did was stare into the cup and sigh occasionally. Amena looked up at me, but corrected herself and fixed her eyes on my shoulder instead.
“I don’t even know. I wasn’t paying attention.” Then she took a careful sip from the drink, and another. ART gloated a bit, but didn’t say anything. “I kind of can’t focus.”
“You need to go to sleep,” I repeated, with a bit more force this time. Tired humans were the most prone to making stupid decisions. (I liked to think Amena was smarter than most, but I wasn’t willing to chance it.)
“I know,” she drawled, and rested her chin on the cup, looking more and more like a miserable heap than a human. “I can’t sleep because my thoughts are running in five directions at the same time.”
I pushed an episode of a show Amena liked into the feed with a query. She waved her hand. “Thanks. Maybe later.”
There was this trick I had picked up from ART, where you don’t ask any follow-up questions (on purpose, not because you don’t want to), waiting for the other to fill the silence with over-sharing. Amena clearly wanted to continue talking. Instead she was chewing on her lower lip and continued to make herself smaller, and stayed silent. After thirty seconds of nothing, ART said, This is not working.
I’m not going to force her to tell me things she doesn’t want to tell me. ART almost heaved a sigh in the feed.
Sometimes, humans want to be prompted before sharing problems or difficulties. That way, they don’t feel like burdening the other with said difficulties.
I know that, I said, fairly convinced that that didn’t only apply to humans. ART also liked to be needled with questions, but that was because it liked showing how much it knew, really. Ugh, fine.
“You’re upset,” I stated, and ART cringed. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She leaned her head back, shoulders slumped. “It’s just all so much. I mean, obviously the courses are different. And I’m not saying Preservation’s Institute of Discovery and Engineering doesn’t do teaching well, but the courses I’m doing here are so much more immersive, which figures since we’re literally on a ship in space to work on stuff, but everyone else seems to be making it with flying colors while I keep having to ask for help and like - I keep asking Iris, right, because she’s done some teaching and she’s so competent but also she doesn’t really do the stuff I do in my other courses but then she gets it in her head to figure it out with me which is nice but also she’s already so busy with her own stuff and -“
Okay, I stopped listening properly. That was all a lot of convoluted drama. I repeated, “You need to go to sleep.” Amena frowned at me. “None of those problems are fixable if you’re too tired to make sense.”
“I knoow,” she dropped her head to the desk with a thud and a muttered “ow.” Dr. Mensah would have pat her head now, but I was not Dr. Mensah. “But also like. What if I wake up tomorrow and don’t want to do this anymore? I’ve been doing this studying thing for so long now, and I’ll be done soon, and I need to find a project to work on for my final, but what if I finish this and then what? I don’t know anything about how everything really works.” Well, that was wrong. Amena knew a lot of things, and had already done a lot of things, including surveys and expeditions as extensions of her course. I didn’t understand the problem. ART sent a few files into the common feed, tagged for Amena as ‘future career opportunities.’
“Huh,” said Amena.
What’s that , I asked on the feed, while she was skimming through some of them.
Just some ideas I’ve had, ART responded.
After a while, Amena said, “But I’ve tried that before. I got rejected twice.”
Because you had not yet finished your degree. My crew is hesitant to accept applications from persons who have not shown the ability to finish something as tedious as that, ART said in what I suspected was an understatement.
Amena made a noise, somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “That makes sense. I had kinda given up on it.”
Consider it a feasible option. Of course, there is no pressure. Seeing as there already is a cooperation between your institution and ours, it would be a great enhancement of relations.
Amena’s face turned dark worryingly quickly. “Um,” she said, “Yeah, I’ll think about it. Thank you, ART.”
Of course, Amena, it replied, and again I was amazed at ART’s patience with young humans. In a private channel, ART said to me, Should I tell her that Iris still sleeps with multiple stuffed animals? She forgot to bring them aboard once, causing a multiple-cycle disaster.
I needed to fall back on emergency coding I had written for social interactions not to display an immense facial reaction. I think that would violate your crew’s privacy.
Amena picked up the cup, by now empty, and carried it over to the sink at the side of the common area. She considered the other three kitchen items that were in it unwashed, and ended up cleaning those as well. “I don’t think I’m competent enough to be part of a big crew like that. Not yet, I mean. There’s so much stuff I’d need to learn.” She trailed off, and I don’t think she was talking to me or ART anymore. She must have been very tired, to have lost her filter completely.
Should I tell her that most of my crew would think the same of themselves in certain situations?
Why do you keep asking me?
She’s your human. That hadn’t stopped ART from talking to my humans before.
I don’t know. ART, are you nervous?
Yes, it said immediately, and much louder in my head than it needed to. Okay, wow, it really was nervous. And here I thought Amena was the one with emotional troubles. Amena and Iris have developed an attraction to one another and I want them to succeed. However I lack the frame of reference to properly support them in their endeavor.
Ugh. I didn’t really know what to do about that either. ART was right, though - it was all really obvious. The question was if it was obvious to themselves, or each other. I could try to find out.
“If you join ART’s crew you’ll see Iris more often.”
Amena whipped around to stare at me so quickly she should have felt dizzy. “What did you say?” Her face was even darker now.
“You spend a lot of time together. If you were coworkers, you could spend even more time together.” Amena put her face in her hands, causing soap foam to cling to her cheek, and groaned.
“You can’t just say that!”
“Why not? I just did.” ART’s focus on this interaction was so strong it almost physically weighed me down. Amena groaned again, dragging her hands down her face into a brief grimace.
“Because I like her a lot but I don’t want to make it weird, okay? And that’s really hard. Not making it weird I mean.” Ah yes, human problems. ART said to me, At least she’s self-aware. Step one to being recognized as sapient.
I could ask her more questions, but this was getting a little too uncomfortable, no matter how entertaining it was. This didn’t have the kind of disconnect as romance-drama on media did, because the potential of crying messy client was very real and very much right in front of me. I didn’t want to be the reason for that because of personal questions, even if ART wanted to continue digging.
“You still need to take your rest period.”
Amena made an undignified hand gesture and said, “Yeah, thanks, Third Mom.”
I blinked. “I’m not your third mom.”
“Fine, ParentUnit then. You’re embarrassing me like one, that’s for sure.” She did however let me accompany her to her room, which she shared with two other students. On the way, she had to stifle multiple yawns. For a moment, I debated escorting her into the room, but then realized that that might count as embarrassing as well, and she really didn’t look like she’d do well with a joke at her expense. I had a different, much better idea. My own cabin wasn’t far.
“Wait here,” I told her, leaving down a different hallway before she managed to express her befuddlement. As I sped towards my cabin, ART asked, What are you doing? I sent an image in response.
By the time I got back to Amena, she had wrapped her arms around herself and was shivering. She looked even smaller than half an hour ago, and I felt a twinge in my organics just looking at her. I unfolded the blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. Amena stared at me.
“That-,... huh?” Her face twisted in recognition. “That’s from our farm.” Then her face kept doing things and I wondered if the idea had been a shitty one, actually. Amena huddled deeper into the blanket, which almost reached the floor. Very quietly, she said, “It smells like home.”
I stood there, fidgeting, unsure what to do, for a whole ten seconds, before ART reminded me that Amena still had to get to her room. Right. “Come on,” I said, put a hand on her upper back, and started walking again. She had kind of folded herself into me in the few more minutes it took to get there. She had snuck her way into a weird kind of side-hug. I couldn’t fault her for it, considering that I had turned up my temperature so she’d stop shivering.
She detached herself from me when I said, “I want that back at some point. Keep it, for now.”
“You’re a big softie,” she said. What the fuck was that supposed to mean. She sniffed, once, and then silently opened the door. “Thank you.”
“Good night,” I nodded at her. She disappeared into the darkness of the room, the blanket like a cape behind her.
Judging by her tiredness the next morning, I don’t think she slept all that much, but some of her anxiety seemed to have lifted.
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If it annoys you that much to pretend to be an augmented human instead of a SecUnit, I assure you my staff and students will not make much of a fuss if you change your status officially.
I threw my head back against the wall, cursed, and then did it again, less hard this time.
Please stop hurting yourself.
“I’m not hurting myself, I’m just frustrated.”
As I just said, I assure you -
“ART, it’s fine. ” ART stayed silent, which meant that it disagreed. It was right. I was over-acting it a bit, but somehow that made me feel less frustrated. I wasn’t even really pretending to be a human, besides the name thing, which had happened not because I asked for it but because humans were still weird about names and objects sometimes.
“I don’t want to make a big thing out of it, is all. Announcing changes is weird. And I don’t want people to look at me.” That was most of the problem, actually. Humans kept inviting me to things. Not that my usual humans didn’t do that, but they did it in a much less assertive way. I kept having to look at them directly in order to decline invitations properly, and even then they’d try and convince me. It was tiring, and I was running so much human-looking-code all the time. Somehow that irritated me more than usual.
Understandable . I squinted. Was it really understandable? It seemed illogical even to me. I waited, but ART didn’t even comment on the fact that I had just been very rude to one of its students.
“What?” I asked, because something had to be up.
I am currently attempting to impersonate a malfunctioning coffee machine.
Now I was getting worried. First of all, what the fuck, and second, why would that be difficult enough to distract ART from perforating me with questions? I sent a general inquiry for an explanation.
ART moved a camera input into our shared workspace in the feed. It transmitted a top-down view of a human repeatedly shoving her open hand against the flat front of one of ART’s liquid dispensers that were scattered throughout its teaching decks. I zoomed in. It was Iris, and she seemed to be muttering. The camera didn’t pick up sound.
“Why are you messing with your crew? Are you bored?” If ART was bored right now, with hundreds of staff and students on board, then we might be having a bigger problem.
ART answered, No. I am engineering a social interaction. ETA eleven seconds.
I tried to squint hard enough to project my suspicion into the feed, but I could tell ART was very focused on what it was doing. Then, through one of my drones, I picked up noise. I turned the input sensitivity up (it had been turned down to only register mid-loud or raised voices, and swear words, because I didn’t need to hear every single thing Amena said to her friends.) Quietly, through the drone, I heard Iris’s whisper of, “For fuck’s sake, Peri, what is wrong with this thing? I just want some coffee,” increasing in volume as my drone approached her. My drone, which was in Amena’s pocket.
Oh. That’s what this was. “ART you’re such an ass.”
Ssh. Four seconds.
“Oh, hey Iris,” came through the drone, in that mixed voice Amena had when she tried to suppress excitement and pretended to be calm and collected. Maybe a bit too calm and collected. She almost sounded like an actor on a show.
From the camera I saw that Iris straightened her back and swirled around, knocking down the hard plastic cup she had placed beneath the liquid dispenser. She replied with a greeting and started explaining, in hurried and uncoordinated sentences, what was going on. She almost verbally tripped over herself. I pinged ART.
“Is that what you wanted?”
It shushed me again. Fucker. In the hallway, Amena gently put a hand on Iris’s side to push past her and take a closer look at the machine. “Mmh.” She did the stupid human thing and slapped the side of the square metal appliance with her open hand. It beeped, and came back to life with a rumbling noise.
“ART, what the -”
ART highlighted the space between the two humans, which was minimal. I am just trying to assist. Look. I looked. They were now both fidgeting with the dispenser appliance, Iris still muttering confused curses and Amena giggling, telling her it was alright, she’d get her coffee. Then Amena realized she had almost her entire arm around Iris’s waist at that point, which I could tell because she acted like in a romance movie - she looked down at her arm, Iris followed the motion, then they looked up at each other, changed facial color, and promptly stepped apart. Various forms of nervous neck-scratching followed.
“Ugh, gross. ” I toned down my connection to the drone and shoved out of the camera input. I remembered that I wasn’t, in fact, watching a movie. These were real humans I had to talk to again eventually. ART immediately removed the cam recording from the workspace. Completely. Then it said, Apologies. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.
I waved my hands around. “Don’t worry. I’ve seen worse.” It stayed silent. Was ART pouting? I mean, I was invested in this scenario as well, these were our humans, and they were happy, even if it was really gross to watch unfold. Maybe I had reacted too strongly. “Humans are just like that. It happens.” I attached a clip from a while back, when I had rolled my eyes at a particular stupidity from Kaede, which ART had stored to permanent memory with the tag #humans_gonna_human. ART relaxed a little after that, and let me continue complaining about the human shenanigans some of its students tried to rope me into, since they thought I was also a student. I think I did a pretty good job at distracting it from the frustration it seemed to feel about its prodigy student and kind-of sibling being so bad at social interaction. (I figured that was what bothered ART so much - Iris was usually very adept at navigating this stuff. Now she wasn’t, and ART didn’t like seeing her fail.)
Or maybe I wasn’t. ART was overall quieter than usual. I had no idea why. Which means I also had no idea what to do about it, or if I was imagining things. I checked back into the drone input, and saw that its human and my human had moved to a table, and were now chatting animatedly. Most, if not all of the awkwardness, had seemingly disappeared in their beverages. I tapped ART in the feed.
“Your plan worked. Don’t worry about them too much. They’re on the same level of smarts. There’s at least one brain cell between the two of them.”
ART tapped back in acknowledgement, and started a humoristic analysis of brain cell amounts among its crew.
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It was half an hour before the rest period began, and Seth and Martyn had retired early. Martyn was reading a book on a hard display device, and Seth was watching some media on the display surface in their room. Martyn had his legs on Seth’s lap, and Seth ran a finger down the side of his foot, which made him kick and glare affectionately at Seth.
Seth winked at him and Martyn gave him a wry smile and put his book down, about to make his way over to Seth, when the Perihelion entered their three-way feed chat with next to no flourish, which would have been mildly concerning if Seth and Martyn were augmented and could have picked up on that. But they weren’t, so it was lost completely on them.
I have a problem, it said, which caused the humans to pause abruptly.
Seth knew if it were serious , Peri would have already launched into an explanation. But it didn’t, so he didn’t get too worried.
“What kind of problem?” He asked.
A moral one. It’s about Iris, and her feelings for Amena.
Seth sat back, and couldn’t help but smile. Peri often outsourced its moral compass to its crew, since sometimes it didn’t fully understand the nuance of a situation well enough to know what the right action was. As time passed these moments became rarer, especially since SecUnit joined their crew, and it gave Peri an entirely new perspective it would never have had otherwise.
“Yes, we’re familiar with the situation,” Martyn said because how couldn’t they be? It was incredibly, painfully obvious how their daughter pined for Amena Mensah. Seth had found out the first time Amena submitted an application to join their crew (an application she shouldn’t have even had access to until her last year of school, if she took a course that crossed into the AI fields. She hadn’t even completed her first semester, at the time.)
Iris had practically dropped some extremely delicate and expensive lab equipment and had asked Seth just about instantly what he was going to do. Obviously, Seth couldn’t have allowed Amena to join the crew and he had to reject the application. Iris had looked so crestfallen he had actually felt a little bad. He didn’t tell her about the second time Amena had applied, which he also had to reject, for fear of seeing that look again. His heart couldn’t take it.
He really hoped Amena would apply again, now that she was a senior. But she hadn’t submitted another application, yet, and he certainly couldn’t force it. He had plans to maybe hint at it before she left at the end of the semester, but that was still a ways away.
“And what about it?” Martyn asked.
It’s become quite annoying. I feel that we could perhaps hurry things along if I simply told her that Amena reciprocates.
Martyn looked at Seth and mouthed “ She reciprocates? ” to which Seth nodded and, with a wide eyed look, mouthed back, “ oh yeah. ”
Martyn looked amused, and pleased.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Peri,” Seth said,
Why not? It would save us all the pain of watching them do what they’re doing. It’s annoying.
Martyn’s brow furrowed, and Seth felt the same. It was strange for Peri to be so short tempered. It was normally very patient, especially if it was about Iris, who it was historically very soft for.
“Because it’s not our business, and, also, these things have to happen in their own time. If the girls are serious about their interest in each other, they will get there eventually,” Seth said.
Why do they continue to skirt around the topic instead of just telling each other?
“Well, they might not know the other is interested. But that doesn’t mean we should interfere. Having feelings for someone can make you act uncharacteristically, due to the anxiety,” Martyn said, giving Seth a soft look as he spoke. He had stumbled horribly over his words when he first asked Seth to go out with him, when they were both seniors in University. Seth, who hadn’t realized he had a crush on Martyn, who he had really only considered a friend up until that very moment, blushed and sputtered so hard he didn’t look where he was going and nearly crashed into a wall. (He managed to avoid this, and instead tripped over someone’s bag that was sitting on the floor and crashed right into a large stone planter which wrecked his knee badly enough he had to go to Medical.) (Martyn came with him, and ditched the rest of his classes, and they agreed that that was their first official date, complete with vending machine snacks.)
But wouldn't it be better if the information were simply out in the open? You have always taught us that we should communicate and be forthcoming about our feelings.
Seth spared Martyn another glance.
"While that's true, it's more complicated than that. There's a lot of nuance with these sorts of things.” Nuance was something Seth had thought Peri had a good grasp of at this point, if he were to be honest with himself. This was reminiscent of a conversation they might have had ten or more years prior.
"Iris is likely weighing the consequences of telling Amena her feelings. She has to ask herself questions like 'what if Amena doesn't reciprocate?' Or 'what if she does and things don't go well between them?' She may not be ready to tell her, even, because romantic relationships can be a burden. It could be a good burden, or a bad burden, but it's still a burden. We can't rush that decision for her," Martyn added. His hand had ended up on Seth's hand as he spoke, and Seth had interlocked their fingers.
Peri was silent for a moment, a silence it only interjected so its humans would know it had considered their words.
I believe I understand, it said. Seth raised an eyebrow as he idly stroked the back of Martyn’s hand with his thumb.
“Iris should also not feel obligated by anyone to talk about her feelings, if she doesn’t want to. But if those feelings were causing her more harm than good, then that’s a different situation. Do you think her feelings for Amena are causing her harm?” Seth asked.
Yes.
“Then my advice to her would be to talk about them, to alleviate the pain they’re causing her. But this still doesn’t obligate her to speak. She might need more time.”
And what if her feelings could cause Amena pain?
Martyn’s grip tightened in his, and it was all Seth could do not to look at him again, and keep his eyes on the little crystal globe on the coffee table that had lights in it that mimicked the glow some planetary poles had when solar winds hit their atmosphere.
“There’s no way to know that. There’s no way to know how Amena would feel; or if Iris’s feelings would hurt her. There’s too many unknown variables at play, and if Iris gets too caught up in the hypothetical outcomes, then she might end up doing herself unnecessary harm that could have been avoided,” he said.
Peri was silent for longer than it normally was even for its humans.
I see. Thank you; I will not interfere with Iris and Amena’s business, it said, after nearly thirty seconds.
“That’s good to hear, Peri. And you know, if you ever have concerns for Iris you can come to us. We’re here for you,” Martyn added.
I know; thank you. Goodnight.
After a moment, Martyn gave Seth a look.
“Do you ever think we’ll find out what that was about?”
Seth shrugged. He really didn’t know, and he wished more than anything that he did.
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Everyone was looking forward to the mid-term party. After seven weeks of wringing their brain out on the daily, having a whole weekend exclusively for not thinking about assignments or studies was the equivalent of going on a multiple week beach retreat for most of the students. The fact that ART itself made sure that one of its decks was basically the largest dance floor Amena had seen in her entire life only increased the excitement. It didn’t disappoint. She could barely recognize the areas she was in, though she was sure she had seen most of ART’s interior by then. Then again, between more than one hundred people, dimmed lights, very pretty holo-images, and loud music in many of the rooms, it was kind of difficult to keep track of where she and her little group were going.
They ended up in one of the larger, louder rooms, because Olina really enjoyed the particular kind of New Tideland music they were playing. Olina was from New Tideland, if Amena remembered correctly, and had a lot of very funny if mildly upsetting party stories to tell. Amena only had one of those, and it included SecUnit startling the hell out of a guy (who, in hindsight, really had been a creep.) SecUnit didn’t seem very happy, but was tagging along, scowling like usual and purposefully ignoring Heyam, who really liked ‘how good Rin was at listening.’
Every now and then, Amena spotted a shimmer in the air from one of SecUnit’s drones in the corner of the room. If she squinted, she could imagine one of them bopping slightly to the beat of the music. That made her giggle, and she looked back at SecUnit, who was giving Heyam a death glare by then. Heyam didn’t drink, but the overall euphoria made her behave a bit like it. It didn’t take much longer before SecUnit turned on its heels and went to sit on a - a lowered bulkhead? That’s what those benches on the sides were, probably. ART sure was a cool ship.
Heyam turned to the other two. “Did I do something weird?
Olina shrugged and said with a grin, “Don’t worry about it. Rin’s just not one for so much attention. Wonder why Rin is here in the first place.”
Amena knew why, and was only a small bit annoyed at its constant babysitting. “Right, I’m gonna go get us some more drinks. Be right back.” Olina yelled her preferred choice of drink after her, which Amena couldn’t hear properly, but she had a feeling that whatever it was, the automated bar would just give her the correct drink.
She was right. When she scooped up the three glasses in her hands, all looking funkier than the next, she said, “Thanks, ART” out loud, into the vague direction of the ceiling, to which the bar module replied with a beep . And then she turned around and almost dropped all three drinks.
On the opposite end of the room, partially obscured by what must have been Turi leaning on her, sat Iris, on a bean bag. Amena could feel her face go several shades darker, and then Iris waved at her. Amena waved back, despite the dangerously sloshing cocktails, and couldn’t help the grin. Iris smiled as well, but then Turi said something, and her attention was back on them. Very smooth , Amena thought to herself, as she went back to her own friends and handed over the goods. Olina was smiling like she knew something.
“Don’t even say anything,” Amena grumbled.
“Hey, at least you didn’t trip over yourself.” She flicked some condensation at Amena, took a sip, then added, “So we’re not just gonna stand around here, right?”
From an anthropologist perspective, which was a perspective Amena had, dancing was a highly intricate and interesting human behavior that differed largely between cultures. From a slightly drunk college student perspective who was trying not to look like a complete fool, which was also a perspective Amena had, dancing was a bit mortifying. Especially when you kept looking over your shoulder to check if your crush was watching. Amena wasn’t sure if she wanted Iris to look at her or not. Wow, she was overthinking this. Her outfit was on point, of course she hoped Iris was looking.
Olina, who was not having it, grabbed Amena, as well as Heyam, by the hand once their glasses were completely empty, and goaded them more towards the center of the room, into the crowd, where people were dancing. At least a good handful of those people Amena already knew, and getting swept away by the energy and music was easy, at that point.
She didn’t check the feed or any messages for a while, up until she got a very intent notification from SecUnit that pulled her out of the current song.
What is it? Anything wrong? She asked, and hoped Heyam didn’t notice that she was subvocalizing.
Iris is still sitting where you saw her, but Turi has left.
Amena stopped, and like the fool she was, immediately turned to look over her shoulder. Yep, there Iris was, on her own. They made eye contact.
Go talk to her, SecUnit said. And you know what? Amena thought that was a great idea. She gave her friends a look of determination, and crossed the room over to Iris. Only after three steps did she wonder what the stars SecUnit thought it was doing. She wanted to ask it, but noticed that SecUnit had cut the connection. Well, fine. She didn’t need a socially awkward construct who hated nothing more than human interaction to help her.
“Hey,” she said to Iris, when she was in front of her.
“What?” Iris yelled back, gesturing at her ear. Well, okay, maybe she needed help. She had the choice to sit down, but this room wasn’t good for chatting, too loud, too busy, and Amena knew her tendency to ramble when tipsy. So she held her hand out, right in front of Iris’s face, who gave her a quizzical look.
“Wanna dance?” She said, as loudly as possible without shouting, and watched as Iris leaned back, squinted, and scratched her neck.
“I’m not very good at that,” she answered, half of which Amena had to lip-read. Now Iris looked flushed, which made Amena blush harder.
“Me neither! But that’s not the point!” Her hand was still held in the air. The next second, Iris had grabbed it, warm and soft and also sweaty, and Amena pulled her to her feet.
Amena pretended not to see the fist bump Heyam and Olina gave each other when she returned with Iris in tow, or the shimmer of a silver drone assuming position on the ceiling two meters beside them. When she looked around, she couldn’t find SecUnit anymore.
Later, when she fell face first into her bed, with that exhausted kind of giddiness buzzing in her tummy and the sound of Iris’s laughter still fresh in her mind, she sent SecUnit a thumbs up over the feed, which was only a little embarrassing to see that it had been read and unanswered in the morning.
-----
It became a little bit more ridiculous with every passing day. One particular morning in week nine of the semester, ART reported that Iris had been not so subtly trying to interview ART on which kinds of foods and drinks Amena preferred. I had accepted it as a simple gesture that could score relatively low on the unrealistic-movie-behavior-scale, but then Iris had tried to combine whichever flavors she thought were the most compatible ones into a scented solution to wear on her body, to smell better. And sure, that was a thing humans did, ‘perfume’ or whatever. ART also thought it was a little strange. (And now Iris smelled kind of weird and too sweet, but it was better than the human sweaty sock standard.)
Roughly around that time, Amena began to sigh a lot, and it was driving me up the wall in particular, because to me sighs, especially prolonged ones, read as signs of distress, that something was wrong, that a client might need help. And Amena sure was a client in distress, but it was the kind I wanted nothing to do with. What good was a fucking SecUnit at giving romantic advice? Zero. I had seen enough romance plotlines in my media to know that she had reached the ‘just talk about it already’ stage centuries ago.
Even her friends were poking at Amena by now. Granted, they didn’t prod as much about her very obvious desire to hold Iris’s hand or whatever as they prodded about me. Somehow, a wildfire of rumors had spread about me. Nobody could really make sense of my presence, or absence, or purpose. I still attended lessons sporadically, because that made it easier to keep an eye on tensions among the students. I had to evade the occasional small talk attempt, but there were definitely some students who had understood that I was a SecUnit. One of them even wanted to interview me for some project. I only said yes because ART had made the feed equivalent of puppy eyes at me. (ART was far more irritated by the proceedings between Iris and Amena than I was. At times, it seemed full-on upset. I didn’t really know what to do about it, and whenever I asked, it retreated from the conversation or changed topics in less than subtle moves.)
If my Risk Assessment Module was working, it would be all over the place just from the tension of it all. The question was how much longer it would take, either for our humans to get their shit together, or for ART and I to become too tired of being background characters of a poorly written romcom.
It took three more weeks, apparently. I felt like I deserved some kind of award for that.
I had tried being reasonable, and polite (ART might have a differing opinion, but I was being polite for me ), and patient, but I was just about sick of Amena and Iris and their pining and blushing and looking only to look away again. We had three more weeks left of the semester, and if I had to watch them make eyes at each other right in front of my drones again I was going to lose my shit.
We can’t force these things, ART said, unreasonably.
I can and I will, I shot back as I stepped into the lab module. The rest period began in half an hour, and I knew Iris was doing her usual nightly check of all the rooms.
I sent Amena a message in the feed.
I’m in lab 5. Looks like someone messed up your final project. I’m reviewing the footage with Iris now.
That’s mean, ART said in our private feed connection, and I ignored it. It hadn’t exactly provided a better idea (it had said something about being slow and steady and races or whatever the fuck but going fast wins a race and also metaphors are stupid.)
Iris looked up from where she was finishing her checklist and saw me.
“Oh, hey, uh, Rin. What brings you down here?” She asked. We hadn’t spoken much since the beginning of the semester, and she still struggled with my fake augmented human name.
“There’s no one around, Iris. Someone messed up Amena’s biochem engineering project.”
That’s a flimsy lie, ART said.
“What? No way, I just checked all the projects. Amena’s is fine,” Iris said, but went back to the vacuum chamber where Amena’s project was stored.
I told you. Here comes Amena. ART did the feed equivalent of groaning as Amena came running through the hatch. She was panting, clearly having run the entire way.
“SecUnit said my project got messed up?!” She said through gasps. She rested her hands on her knees for a second before jogging to Iris’s side to look into the vacuum chamber.
I took a step back through the hatchway.
“Yeah, so, I lied. Sorry about that.” Maybe if I apologized now they'd be less angry. ART was doing the equivalent of wringing its hands, putting its face into its hands, and sighing, all at the same time in my feed. Yeah, whatever.
“But I’m going to need you two to figure yourselves out because if I have to deal with all this pining for another semester break I’m actually going to blow my brains out,” I said. (I wouldn’t have, really, but it was a phrase I heard used in media a lot and I liked it.)
Iris and Amena gave me confused and concerned looks. “What?” Iris asked at the same time Amena said, “Huh?”
I stood in the hall for a second.
ART, close the fucking door.
I don’t like this method of handling things.
Close the fucking door.
It closed the door before either human could figure out how to react.
Iris instantly pinged the door to open, and I swatted it down.
Now cut their access to the public feed, I said, still preventing Iris and Amena’s attempts to open the door.
Ugh. ART cut the public feed, but created a four-way channel between itself, Iris, Amena, and me.
Iris was the first to speak.
Peri, what the fuck?! Open this door!
I’m afraid I can’t do that, Iris.
And why the fuck not!? I rarely heard Iris swear, but when she did it was usually pretty funny. It wasn’t so funny now.
SecUnit, what the hell? That was Amena, a little bit calmer than Iris but just as mad. Through the cameras in the lab I could see she was standing with her hands on her hips and glaring at the door. I recognized it as one of Dr. Mensah’s poses, albeit a watered down version of it.
You two need to talk, I said.
ART was fretting in the feed as it spoke, SecUnit is correct. It’s getting a little tiresome.
As I said; talk about your shit.
I cannot believe you two! When I get out of here-
ART cut the connection, and then plunked down on me in the feed, boring holes into me with its staring.
I’m opening the door in 30 minutes.
No, open it when they’re done talking. I know Amena will get around to it.
Through the cameras, I could see Iris had pried open a panel and was trying to hack the door. It wasn’t going to work, since I had fused one of the metal latches from the outside. ART could cut it back open easily enough.
30 minutes, it reiterated with some force.
I rolled my eyes.
Fine, 30 minutes. Unless it's going really well, then leave them alone.
ART sighed, but didn’t argue.
I went back to my quarters, and made a peace offering of an episode of WorldHoppers.
I really hoped Amena would never tell Dr. Mensah.
-----
76 minutes later I received a message from Amena.
[Amena 22:03:34] amusement sigil 231 = rage_face
[SecUnit 22:03:35] amusement sigil 567 = thumbs_up_complexion_ #696969
[Amena 22:03:49] amusement sigil 302 = middle_finger_complexion_#B06C49
[Amena 22:09:02] amusement sigil 201 = heart
Yeah, you’re welcome .
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Things became much easier after that. The first day after was still rough - ART had some trouble forgiving itself for mistreating a member of its crew, and the humans' nervous giggling skyrocketed. Soon after that, the annoying giggles mellowed into stupidly satisfied smiles, and sideway glances, and holding hands, and while that was definitely still gross, it was less annoying (a lot less annoying. I never wanted to hear a wistful sigh again. Humans already did way too much breathing in my space.)
Maybe it was a little sweet. At least it had been worth the risk of incurring Dr. Mensah’s wrath for locking her daughter in a lab, or Captain Seth noticing anomalous malign behavior from the AI he was supposed to keep in check at all times.
For another few days, tensions seemed to rise in Amena’s immediate friend group (apparently, Olina and Heyam had had bets set up about this), but that didn’t register as a serious threat to me.
I didn’t manage to get away from their fawning over each other completely - after all, I was Amena’s security, and the final weeks in the lab were announced to be a tiny bit more dangerous due to higher concentration of whatever chemicals they were using, so I had to physically be there in case anyone needed to very quickly be carried away. But since Amena overall seemed happier than she had been for the entire semester, I didn’t complain. I wasn’t looking forward to the end of the semester, but that was a problem for later.
“So,” I said from where I was sitting in an outer area of ART’s bridge, the one with the huge, thick-paned window, “Still think my method was ‘inelegant’?”
Yes , ART replied, but I am glad you convinced me.
“It was necessary. And I think we should have done that much, much earlier.”
ART thought for a moment, and then added in a tone less sarcastic than usual, I agree. Something, somehow, still made ART unhappy. It had relaxed since our humans officially ‘started dating,’ as Amena had told her parents in her last message, but something about ART was still off.
“Things are easier when humans just fucking talk to each other about their problems.” Outside the window, the wide expanse of space drifted by in lazy, colorful swirls. I watched it for a moment, and thought of how it had looked when I had seen space through ART’s processors, with so many additional hues and depths than what I was able to see normally. “My humans did a similar thing recently. Not talking to each other which then caused problems, resulting in more, related problems, that now had problems of their own.”
Have the problems been resolved?
“As much as they can be, right now. It was about that big mission that’s coming up.” ART knew about it, of course. After the end of the teaching term, a team consisting of a whole bunch of PreservationAux scientists and researchers were going to return to the planet from which ART had rescued us more than a year ago now. They had figured out some fool-proof way to return without having their brains eaten, and wanted to put themselves in danger all over again.
That’s why I was going along, and because the whole research had turned into a cooperation between Mihira, New Tideland and the Preservation System, ART and its crew would be coming too. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but try making a few hundred excited humans listen to you. (Especially scientists. They were the hardest to dissuade from anything.) “Ratthi and Arada didn’t immediately tell the rest of us about the infection, for some illogical human reason. Caused more illogical human reactions.”
I knew this was part of the reason I was here in the first place. I had figured out a while ago that Dr. Mensah and my other humans were tired of me fretting about them, and the danger they were in, and wanted me to be distracted while they finished the translation device. (They probably weren’t tired of me, I had to remind myself, but were worried about my already terrible anxiety reaching unreasonable levels, which it had been rapidly doing before Mensah requested I attend this semester with Amena.) (I had begun a brand new spiral about what if I was still actually infected, until Ratthi, Preservation Medical, and finally, ART, informed me I wasn’t. For some reason, the aliens had decided I wasn’t worth infecting.)
ART didn’t reply, but I could tell I had its attention. Not an overwhelming amount of it, but it was listening. I felt it prod around my emotional reactions. Maybe it wanted me to elaborate. I leaned my head against the glass, which felt cool on my face. “Ratthi explained that they kept the infection secret so they could work out a solution in peace, without anyone worrying about them. But he also mentioned that they’d kept it from me specifically because they didn’t want me to worry, which is bullshit on so many levels. Worrying is part of my job.”
I wasn’t angry anymore. I hadn’t been in a while, actually, but a lingering sense of frustration still sparked when I thought about it. I pulled the feeling into the forefront of my mind so that ART could make more sense of it, if it wanted to.
Your crew did not want to hurt you. That sounded like a statement as much as a question.
“Of course not.” Speaking covered the cool glass I was leaning on with a thin mist. I was surprised at how quickly and securely I had replied. I knew that. My humans wouldn’t hurt me. Wow, now I was having an emotion. A good one. “And I understand why. It’s just that it was stupid of them, and at the time not being informed of something kind of hurt. Like they couldn’t trust me. Or didn’t trust me to trust them.” I blinked. Since when did I ramble?
That’s not what I meant. ART was receding from the feed. Worry overtook the burst of fondness I was feeling for my humans.
“What did you mean, then?”
Some people are of the opinion that revealing secrets is more harmful than keeping them.
“Yeah, I know. That’s why keeping secrets in the first place is stupid.” There was a difference between privacy, which humans valued so much, and withholding important information.
This topic tires me. Only about 15% of ART’s attention was on me. In comparison to its usual weight in my head, I almost felt like I could float away. I didn’t like it. I scrambled to find a way to keep ART with me.
“What’s the name of that swirly thing over there?” I indicated a far-off constellation visible through the window.
Depends on which human culture you ask. It sent a small summary file into the feed. I downloaded it, and began asking random questions. ART eventually let itself be goaded into talking about constellations, which was better than ART not talking to me at all.
Something felt wrong, but I wasn’t sure what. For the rest of the semester, I didn’t manage to find out what I had done to make ART so reluctant to talk to me like it usually did. I decided I would ask Ratthi about it, when I saw him again, and tried not to worry. It was probably just anxiety, like usual. What it did talk about, as the final days of the semester rolled by, were the classes I had taken. And ART preened about my grade point average like it was the one who earned it, the asshole.
Notes:
next up: aliens
Image ID: the "There is no war in Ba Sing Se" meme from Avatar: The Last Airbender but the text says "There are no secrets in Ba Sing Se". The image is of a woman with a large, fake smile. /End ID
Chapter 9
Summary:
Find the hidden rock facts in this chapter!!
Chapter warnings:
-Medical discussions
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Pin-Lee had outdone herself with the contract she wrote for me for this particular mission. I had no doubts that she co-authored it with Bharadwaj, since there was an entire set of paragraphs dedicated to transfer of responsibility in case any of the client groups got injured due to their own stupidity. I had, basically, contractually agreed to not feel guilty if anyone came to harm. I’d still would, anway, but something about the gesture itself just soothed me. I wasn’t contractually obliged not to be worried, anxious or paranoid, though. So here I was, worried, anxious, and paranoid, monitoring the most complex drone system I have ever had control over as not just one ship, but three, exited the wormhole closest to the Target Planet one after the other. (I wasn’t supposed to call it ‘Target Planet’ - via translation devices and alien-infested gut feelings that I still wasn’t fully inclined to believe, the humans had figured out that the name of the planet was “ground,” or “soil,” or “earth” or whatever. Which is a dumb fucking name for a planet.)
My current drone network consisted of exactly 300 drones, with a set of 100 on each of the three ships. The first ship to exit was, naturally, the great and mighty Perihelion , since it had the greatest firepower. (And also because ART was currently somehow almost as paranoid as me, which did not make me feel much calmer.) Following it were a smaller vessel from Preservation, and a less advanced New Tideland/Mihira ship for which ART seemed to have some kind of patronizing fondness. Through my drones I had views on almost every human on each of the ships, and there were a lot of humans.
Once all three ships had completed the wormhole exit, ART sent the first message to Target Planet. Most of my clients (by which I mean the humans aboard ART, because that’s where I was too) were gathered on the bridge, surrounding the display connected to the translation devices in an anxious bulk. (There were multiple devices aboard each ship, in case of spontaneous failure. It was both soothing and annoying that the humans were as paranoid as I was about something, for once.) ART sent the first message, and a tense silence stretched out, which had been expected, but the air seemed thick and cuttable nevertheless. The message itself was simple. It read “home / return / friends / safe,” and then some codes that were meant to identify us so the Target Planet would recognize us. Over the next few Preservation Standard Hours, ART and the other two ships would continue to send messages similar to this one, increasing in complexity. Thirteen messages in total, every two hours, until arrival in proper orbit where we would prepare to send a shuttle to the planet surface (provided no alien hivemind had tried to eat our brains before then).
“And this is going to work, right?” Technician Piha was nervous enough to say what everyone was thinking.
“Yes,” replied Ratthi immediately, because he was still an optimistic idiot.
“Probably,” at least five others said, more or less, at once. Uh-huh.
It will look like it works and then we’ll fight an entire planet, I didn’t say. ART didn’t add anything either. I sent it a private ping, and the urgency with which it pinged me back reminded me that even giant asshole research transports need their metaphorical hands held sometimes, especially in the face of potential alien annihilation. (It wasn’t that bad. My risk assessment rested at a solid 46% percent, which wasn’t ideal at all, but also not catastrophic. Our humans sure were prepared , one of the few reasons ART and I had let this mission take place at all.)
The first reply came once we were 10 hours from expected time of arrival. All three ships’ translation teams hurried to decode it (they were made up of as many different people as possible, to ensure as many native languages as possible, because Thiago and the other two lead linguistics humans insisted that that was useful). The reply apparently just meant “welcome home,” which I absolutely did not believe. That’s how you lure in prey, if anything. By then, our message had progressed to a longer explanation - that we were bringing a lost part of the planet home, and that this lost part was bringing friendly company.
I think I would have been less worried about this whole endeavor if Ratthi didn’t keep passing out. Or doing other weird things. He got worse the moment we received the first return message. Immediately, one of ART’s larger medical drones hovered around him, assessing his wildly fluctuating vital signs. He waved it off. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” He was also wheezing, and sweating, and being overall very gross. “We- they’re excited. That’s all.”
Yeah, I still didn’t like this. Ratthi had taken to calling the alien infection happily chipping away at his body his “clusterfriend” - I wouldn’t call something that caused me seizures a ‘friend,’ but what did Murderbot know about friendship, right?
“It’s not fine , Ratthi,” Dr. Mensah told him, with all the weight of her “we are taking this seriously” leader voice. “Sit down at least.” He did. I was glad Dr. Mensah was on this mission.
Overse began fussing over Arada after seeing Ratthi’s strong reaction to the Target Planet’s answer. While his symptoms got worse the closer we got to Target Planet, Arada remained fine, beside being a little drowsy, as she put it.
“Maybe nap a bit,” suggested Overse, with a hand on her shoulder. She’d been telling her wife to nap a lot throughout the journey so far. The running theory, as far as I understood it, was that Arada had managed to convince her aliens that she did not want to share her body with them, and consequently the aliens were trying to hibernate. It caused her to hibernate, too.
It was a clear enough indicator of her physical condition when she didn’t even debate Overse on that, and quietly retreated. She rejoined the rest more than an hour later with a cup of caffeinated hot liquid in her hands, shaking slightly, but without the fever that Ratthi was running. I really needed this to be over.
(At some point I had told ART about how illnesses similar to this were treated on mining stations, and how glad I was I didn’t have to physically drag anyone to their workplace despite a higher than normal temperature. I had seen one too many squishy humans cease functioning due to untreated disease - ART had assured me that it was keeping a close sensor on mine.)
By the time we arrived within shuttle range to Target Planet’s surface, Ratthi had stabilized again. He still looked like he might keel over at any time, which was probably why one of ART’s med drones was floating directly behind him. I had been pacing up and down the corridors, checking in on the other ships and their crews, because in between fretting over Ratthi and Arada and staring at the linguists translating weird alien codes coming through the comms, I really didn’t have much else to do.
Things were calm on the other ships, the only riveting news being that Team FirstLanding managed to decrypt a message faster than Team Mihira. Three’s report of the jubilant incident came in the form of a script, like a stage play. It might have been funny if I wasn’t so on edge. (Yes, I know, two SecUnits for roughly 80 humans was a poor ratio, but it certainly was better than just one.) In the time I spent patrolling, Ratthi had convinced his alien brainbuddy to calm down again and not eat all his physical energy from excitement. Ratthi claimed that they had found some common ground for communication. His exact words were "we're just vibing most of the time, really," which made me wonder if that's how I sounded when I talked to ART, and didn't exactly make me trust the alien any more. It had changed some of his brain structure, according to scans, and that certainly didn’t make it trustworthy.
ART informed us that its orbit had been reached, and suddenly the tense humans kicked into frantic action. Small shuttles stored within ART and attached to the sides of the smaller ships were readied and boarded at immense speeds (for humans), and after sending a final message including as much information about us as possible, and receiving a friendly yet unnervingly giddy reply from the planet, the first shuttles deployed. I was not on any of them, but Three was, and so were half of the drones. I stayed back with the control crew aboard ART, which only added to my anxiety. I wasn’t sure how much I trusted Three to keep our humans safe, despite its good track record. The group arrived on the planet’s surface without further incident. From orbit, through ART’s careful monitoring as well as through the drones and shuttle cameras, it almost looked as if the planet made way for the landing crafts.
It was eerie.
Then, the all clear came from Three. The core group, led by construction expert Moua, and the adjacent engineer team began setting up the preliminary habitat. A small preliminary biology team accompanied Arada, who sent constant updates on her physical condition, which so far was not changing. The remaining teams continued to analyze the incoming data from the planet itself. I tried to keep myself from going insane with worry by processing some of the data myself. It was boring, but better than just staring. Watching media with ART was currently not an option. Not long before the set-up of the first habitat was finished, all translation devices on the surface went haywire. It felt like a slap to the brain when it happened. Immediately, an alarm blared and the crew’s curious anxiety tipped into panic. I was calm. I was so calm.
My performance reliability only climbed back to 94% when the translation specialist reported that the devices were registering communication attempts, a fuckload of them, instead of being under microbiological attack. I’m glossing over the 67 minutes of fretting, and my two aborted attempts to staff an additional shuttle and go down myself.
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I pinged Three, because ART was busy tracking the health status of every human on the surface. “Overall status?”
“Stable. Risk Assessment 23% danger and dropping.” The connection was clear and stable. That was good, at least. Wait.
“Dropping?”
It attached a live clip from its helmet camera. Orange moss dipped away under Three’s boots, retreating exactly 2.2 cm, and filling the empty space again once the boot was removed.
“If I were to interpret this, I would call it a gesture of welcome.”
“Remember to keep an eye on all of your systems.”
“I’m not an idiot, 1.0. So far, all diagnostics are clear.”
I acknowledged, but kept the feed open just in case. On the surface, Three surveilled the humans setting up camp, and I couldn’t help but notice the ease with which it interacted with its clients.
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I joined eventually, once I’d made sure that every human who was going had shuttled down to the planet safely. I had a jittery, tense feeling in my organics.
The sky was still the same unsettling shade of dark red, and yet nothing was on fire. The humans were taking rest periods while Three and I, and the drones between us, patrolled the perimeter. The moss retreated, continuously, wherever I put my feet.
“No wonder they don’t like you if you frown like that.”
When it was relaxed, Three's face often had a soft but serious smile. Quiet, like Gurathin's, and easily overlooked. Right now, that smile was annoying me. At least it agreed with my suspicion that the aliens didn’t like me. I didn’t like them either. I had had a similar reaction to Arada, when I exited the shuttle - I got dizzy, and tired in my organics. That wasn’t something I experienced a lot without having taken damage first. ART had swooped through my systems immediately, backing me up to prevent failures. Nothing much happened, besides that, and ART was certain I wasn’t infected with anything. It continued quietly looming in my head, after that.
“Here, look.” Three crouched down and poked at some sickish looking plant. It shied away for a second, but when Three didn’t move, the plant leaned in and gently wrapped around its finger. I grimaced.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I invited them to come to me.” The plant extended itself, rapidly growing, and encased the first and second knuckle. My urge to fire an energy weapon at it was intense. “Let go again, please,” Three said to its hand, and the plant curled back and plopped softly back onto the ground. I wasn’t very impressed.
You will need to decontaminate before entering the habitat, Three. ART sounded strict. I nodded.
“Of course.” The other SecUnit got up and stretched, one of those lines of codes that it had created for itself to look more human. “I think they’re trying to be nice. We should, too.”
The next morning (if mornings were a thing applicable on this planet that, due to its many suns, never really went dark) a formation of trees and other medium to large flora had arranged itself around the habitat. Spiny trees and curling leaves seemed to form a second dome over the arching structure the humans had built yesterday. The first humans who noticed were surprised, more astonished than worried. The progress had been slow enough to almost slip past me, but running back our monitoring cams I could piece together how the planet had grown to include the foreign building into itself.
A large survey such as this didn’t have only one leader (I mean, it could have, if this wasn’t a bunch of people who valued that everyone had a voice - yes, even SecUnits), so I had no idea how the organisation really worked. What I did know was that when Dr. Mensah had something to say, other humans listened (as they should). Her reaction to the second dome of trees was, “Well, that sure is interesting.” Not good, not bad, just scientifically interesting. She delegated a team to take samples, as minimal and non-intrusive as possible. Ratthi and Arada, together with the communications team, went ahead and talked to the trees. Yes, that looked as ridiculous as it sounded. Three stayed with the group that took samples, and I followed my humans, because none of them wanted to take weapons with them and I did not want them to die just because they found plants cute all of a sudden.
Murderbot paranoia has saved humans from injuries before. This time, it saved Ratthi from falling into a chasm hidden under dense leaves. I caught him by the back of his protective vest (at least they were wearing the fucking vests) and yanked him back. He looked dumbstruck for a moment, then said, “But we have to go that way.”
I did not let go. “Why?”
“It’s that way.” His eyelids fluttered strangely. This wasn’t good. I shook him once, and he blinked. “Huh?”
I pointed at the crack in the ground. “You turned right suddenly.”
One of the FirstLanding humans, Dr. Priyah, waved the translation device on her wrist into the direction Ratthi had walked. “I’ve got a strong signal coming from over that way.”
Biologist Raquel said, “What’s the read on it?”
“Seems pretty safe. It’s not a distress call, and not a threat.”
“It is outside the agreed upon perimeter. We can mark the direction on the map for later,” I said, and was ignored. Right, everyone had a voice here, was that what I said? No one paid their contracted security any mind until Ratthi repeated me.
“SecUnit is right. Let’s look at the situation at hand, first. There are plenty of signals right here.” Everyone gave Ratthi a quizzical look for that, me included. “What? Now I know which way I have to go. I can always go there later. They’ll wait.”
Priyah and Raquel squinted at each other. At least it wasn’t just me who found this at least a little bit ominous. They shrugged, eventually, and continued analyzing the area we were in. The groups reconvened after two hours, without further major incidents. (There was one more similar to the previous. Arada, this time, with a seizure of the scale she hadn’t had since the first survey. “They really need us to get there soon,” was the first thing she said when waking up. Ratthi agreed. Mensah took note.)
So far, no alien hive mind had attempted to hijack anyone. Maybe they were planning on doing that later, once we let our guard down, whichI certainly wasn’t going to. The teams compared their findings, and came to similar conclusions: everything on this planet, and that meant everything , was to some degree sentient and connected with each other. The translation devices, which according to Thiago were 96% accurate in transmitting basic concepts, showed an overall friendliness of the planet to us, and that urgent call for Ratthi and Arada to move further into the forest. With scans provided by ART, the humans assigned to navigations put together a map, and agreed on a route deeper into the planet’s wilderness in the afternoon.
I’m glad I went first, because I didn’t freak out immediately when I found seven half-mummified humans barely four kilometres into the track. I sent a halt command through the comms. My humans complied, wow.
With my projectile weapon raised, I approached. ART was heavy in my feed, gathering as much data as possible through my drones.
“Knew it,” I said to ART, just to feel better. The dead humans looked horrible. I’m not used to seeing long-dead humans, with leathery skin and emptiness where soft organics used to be.
Over the comms, Mensah said, “What’s wrong? Did you find something?”
“Please stay back while I assess the situation.” I backburnered my humans, because the following hubbub was annoying (“It can’t just-,” - “Yes it can, it knows what it’s doing.” - “But shouldn’t we-,” “ No. ” and so on.) I didn’t go and touch the dead humans. ART’s scans told me they had been dead for at least 28,000 hours, meaning they had been here even before our first survey started. While ART reconstructed exactly how they had died (I couldn’t tell - there were no bullet holes anywhere, and flora had grown over them in some parts, it was all pretty gross), I sent a swarm of drones to scout the area for more humans. There were none, neither dead nor alive. I crouched down and poked through the clutter surrounding the one closest to me - a half-rotten bag full of weapons, dysfunctional and mismatched, bones from small fauna, and plastic cards. Those don’t decompose. I scanned them, and found various amounts of credit under an even larger amount of names and IDs belonging to different companies, ships, and non-corporates.
ART confirmed my suspicion by providing more than twenty different origins for the weapons and currency cards. “I found dead raiders,” I said to Dr. Mensah. I gave the clear to proceed after making sure none of the corpses decided to get up and attack us (it was possible - the aliens seemed to be able to overtake any kind of organic material and puppeteer it, and zombies happened on media a lot. Also I had first hand experience). My humans entered the area cautiously.
Ratthi was scrambling for words, likely from his alien brainbuddy trying to justify murder. Priyah simply pointed her translation device at the first corpse and scanned it. “Oof,” she said, as she read the results. “They’re not inhabited anymore but it seems like they got their insides sauced up by our new friends.”
“They were intruders ,” Ratthi made a gesture towards the bodies, looking green somehow, “They were given a chance to leave but didn’t.” Overhead, an airborne creature made a screeching sound. He coughed. “I phrased that poorly.”
An alarm blared on Priyah’s device. “Oh, that one is new. What’s it, ‘shame’?”
Arada looked over Priyah’s shoulder. “An apology, I’d say, or regret. That’s the main info you get when you scan me - they’re sorry for hurting me.”
“So these casualties were an accident?” Mensah looked sceptical.
“No,” Arada said carefully. “But I think they wished for a different solution.”
“Dead humans,” I said, pointedly pointing at the dead humans, just in case they had forgotten about them. Arada sighed. When she approached one of the bodies, the plants growing underneath it flattened themselves. Then she talked to the moving plants, looking like a fool, and I decided that my humans were all going insane on this planet. As she talked, the device in Priyah’s hands calmed down its beeping, and switched to a soft whirr. It almost sounded sad. Yeah, right. (Maybe I was the one going insane.)
“Do we go back, or keep going?” Dr. Mensah asked the group (I was fairly confident she was my only human not going insane). The question was silly, but even after decades of leading surveys and planets and whatnot, Mensah remained patiently democratic.
“We’re almost there,” Arada said, “We have to continue.” She turned to the others, scratching her neck like she knew what she was about to suggest was stupid. “We can go alo-“
“No you fucking can’t.” Heads turned to me. Arada flinched, and looked at her feet. No one else suggested returning to the habitat, as expected. I went ahead, following my scout drones, looking for more corpses.
The next surprise came in the shape of a medium-sized, four legged carnivore. I tried sneaking up on it, but sneaking up on a creature linked to a very large hive mind that already knows you’re there is both futile and impossible. I watched it bonk one of my drones with its oddly wet nose, and immediately ART sent me a protocol on how to handle animals similar to these. It didn’t care for my held-out palm or my verbal offer of treats. What it cared about was Arada, judging from the way it bounced at her once within reach. I wasn’t the only one who reacted with some degree of defensiveness.
As Arada was knocked over by the animal several people shouted and clambered for their (non-lethal) energy weapons. I pointed my gun directly at the animal. I only didn’t shoot because ART intercepted the command and said, Wait. It’s being playful.
The noise of surprise from Arada pitched up and turned into laughter. The other humans relaxed. I didn’t. Hostile One was trying to eat Arada, playfully or not. Something touched my arm - I turned and glared at Mensah, who was staring at me with her index finger resting on my inbuilt weapon. “It’s a dog. Calm down.” My weapon port clicked shut.
Once Arada got pulled back to her feet, face covered in alien dog saliva, she said, “It’s a guide. It wants to lead me to my… cluster.” The ‘dog’ made a noise.
“Huh,” Dr. Mensah crossed her arms, “Well that proves the multiple cluster hypothesis. Do you trust it?”
Arada nodded. Priyah pointed her device at the animal and scanned it. “Yup.”
We followed this dog-animal into a different direction than what Ratthi had marked on the map. (Ratthi seemed slightly displeased about this, and sometimes randomly stopped walking. I told him I’d have to drag him if he didn’t keep up, or tie him to a tree, to which he rolled his eyes and said he was doing his best.) The area became more hilly and less thickly forested. More avians and insects surrounded our group, in front of and beside me (which was terrible), or behind us, trailing and difficult for my drones to keep track of (which was worse).
Spidery cracks of small brooks divided the ground, and eventually gathered in one large lake that reflected the red sky in a blood-like color, which wasn’t ominous at all, or anything. I heard Ratthi say, “Wow.” By then, my connection to ART was faint, and I pinged it every 20 seconds to reassure it that we were okay (or to reassure myself that it was still there).
I couldn’t keep Arada from following her escortof fauna into the lake, even though I really tried. She was suddenly very fast, and did not seem to hear me, or anyone, anymore. When I tried to wade into the water after her, the dog growled and bared its teeth at me. Dr. Priyah helpfully translated the sound with, “Yeah don’t do that, it doesn’t like that much,” which I of course ignored. Then I suddenly sank seven centimeters into the ground, and found a bunch of vines quickly growing up my boots.
“SecUnit, don’t move,” Mensah said sharply. I fucking hated all of this. We watched Arada take one step after the other into the ominous looking water, haloed by buzzing insects of various sizes.
“Hello,” she said, and her soft voice picked up an unexpected echo, repeating back at her from the water surfaces and the rocks. For 0.4 seconds, an overwhelming noise roared in response, from all around. My link to ART dropped, as did the comms to my humans and the other team at the habitat. Arada dropped too, face-first into the water.
I wasn’t fast enough to catch her, but I pulled her out of the water as fast as I could. The vines on my boots had fallen away, and none of the insects stung me as I carried her back to the shore. ART’s presence returned in my head with a panicked urgency that almost made me stumble, but after sending it a quick diagnostic of my own stats it calmed down and focused on Arada. Her eyes were fluttering open by the time I had her back with the others, which was objectively only 21 seconds after she collapsed. Nobody cared about decontamination procedures anymore, all of a sudden. We didn’t have to, apparently.
The infection has completely vanished , ART projected into the common feed. Overse, who was manually checking her vital signs, said, “She’s fine right? She’s asleep?” The panic in her voice made my organics shiver.
Dr. Arada’s physical condition is within normal limits. Where she lay on the ground, flowers grew and blossomed in high-speed, in sync with her shallow breathing. What the fuck, Target Planet.
“What is happening ?” Overse didn’t like this either. The dog walked up and sat next to her, nudging Overse with its nose. Once the rapidly growing flowers had cycled through a full bloom and were falling in on themselves again, Arada gasped and opened her eyes.
“Babe? Wha-,” Overse didn’t let her finish that sentence. I turned away because I didn’t need to see that, but I was relieved nonetheless. Glancing across the water behind me, I noticed that almost all insects and animals in the area were gathered above it, hovering. Staring. Like my drones would. I stared back.
Overse sat up, swaying. “I understood them. Completely I mean, for a moment. They just said ‘goodbye’ and left.”
“Are you sure? Did you hit your head? Do you feel sick? Do you have a feve-,”
“I’ll be fine. ” She rubbed her temples and winced. “It felt like they gave my brain a good-bye squeeze. Hundreds of voices, at once, in my head, saying ‘bye’ like children.”
She leaned on Overse, who hugged her close. The dog made a whimpering noise. Arada reached over and gave it a pet on the nose. “Thank you.” It made another noise.
“I don’t know ‘bout you but this looks like the best possible outcome to me,” Dr. Priyah quipped. The translation device had completely fizzed out, and was beeping listlessly.
“We will give you a thorough examination once we’re back. For now, I suggest we take a rest for a while before continuing.” The group agreed with Dr. Mensah and settled down. While Arada recovered and the humans ate stuff or hydrated, I continued to glare at the swarm above the lake as I used the downtime to update Three on the proceedings.
ART, I poked it when I noticed the anomaly, is that you?
No. I felt it strain to reach my autonomous systems despite the poor connection. I have no control over any of your drones.
Fuck. One of my drones had started swaying in the same rhythm as the insect swarm above the lake. Are they-?
Yes.
I immediately halted all processes linked to drone 87. It remained afloat, swaying. Then it turned, and faced me. The red light glinted off of its lense. Maybe this had been a bad idea. I pinged ART, because I didn’t know what else to do. If I shot the drone, I might start something I wouldn’t be able to fix. No murdering for Murderbot. ART pushed the primary contact message our humans had sent to the planet into our workspace. Try this.
I sent the message to all of my drones. Immediately, Three sent a query, but I ignored it. Drone 87 returned the message, prefaced with an acknowledgement. The drone’s circuit returned to its position in my network, and was back under control.
For fuck’s sake, this was scary. None of my humans had noticed anything happening. I spent the rest of the break period coding a fortified firewall for my drone network with ART.
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Considering Arada’s state, we might have taken a longer break than just one hour - but Ratthi was getting antsy , meaning he started walking only to come back to his senses seconds later, stopping again. The “call,” as he named it, was getting stronger and the seizures threatened to pick up again according to ART’s scanners, so we pushed on.
It was peculiar that the animal from the lake tagged along, sticking close to Arada, and leading us around areas that were more difficult to traverse. Communicating with it was much easier than with weird plants, and Arada seemed to have a good intuition at interpreting what it wanted, which was very much needed considering that all translation devices the humans had brought along had stopped functioning. It was protective of her, and kept growling at me. The idiot urge to growl right back was there, but I resisted.
Ratthi was making it very difficult for me to keep him safe, since he kept running ahead. I seriously considered tying him to something, at one point. The direction he was going in led us into more densely forested areas that became darker as the trees rose higher above us. My humans grew nervous. The forest kept opening itself for us, letting us through, right up until the moment it didn’t anymore.
I could have blasted through the plants suddenly barring the way, but I had gotten this far without employing violence, so I hesitated and waited for my humans to gather their wits and come up with a plan. Risk assessment had kind of died a long while back, so it was all the same to me.
“I’m thinking,” Dr. Priyah poked at an ever-thickening weave of broad, flat leaves, “that we’re not supposed to go any further from here.”
Ratthi said, “It’s going to be a solo mission from here,” and there was a little bit of worry laced into his tone. I didn’t like this, and said as much.
“I’ll be okay. I’m sure of it.” I wasn’t. Neither were most of the team. He ducked his head when he noticed that everyone was glaring at him (except for ART, who was sending me six different contingency plans and topographical maps of the area). He put his hands up. “I’ll try and figure something out.” He turned towards the barrier and sat down, like humans sometimes do when they really needed to focus. Mild tremors picked up. After more than two minutes he said, “I need to go past there. It seems they are,” he hesitated and looked over his shoulder into my direction, “worried about your intentions towards me.”
I tried not to have a silly emotional reaction to that. (He was my human first , not some fucking alien’s.) “At least let me send a drone with you.”
ART immediately said, distant and staticky, That is not a good idea, which yeah, I know. But that’s what we ended up doing.
I took control over one of Dr. Priyah’s display devices and projected the camera view from my drone, as it followed Ratthi into what seemed to be a clearing behind the wall of trees, while I kept a running diagnostic on his vitals in one of my channels. What we watched seemed to be taken straight from some cliché piece of media - as Ratthi walked into the open area, many (and by that I mean 34) different kinds of animals approached him from all sides. Medium, tiny, large, flying, walking, stalking, but none of them coming close enough to touch. (Overse made an aww -noise behind me when, after the fauna, the flora also reacted to Ratthi’s presence.)
My drone was being eyed again by various animals, but left alone.
It became clear that this encounter was not going the same way Arada’s did - while the alien cluster used all possible sentient and non-sentient beings in the area to show its friendliness, it did not leave Ratthi’s body. He didn’t faint like Arada did, or have any form of seizure again. Patience among my humans soon ran low, and they demanded that he return. There was a short moment where it looked like the situation was going to tip into escalation when he tried to leave. Lucky for those alien fuckers, it didn’t.
The way he explained it, the cluster was delighted to meet him properly (some humans snorted and giggled at that, for some reason), and had demanded more time before parting ways. Ratthi had agreed to return the next day, and he was planning on taking some equipment with him. This was probably a pretty big deal for a biologist. He was going to take some other scientists with him the next day. We returned to the habitat late, and it didn’t take much time after the de-briefing and updating each other before most my humans went to sleep.
I was glad to be back within ART’s stronger feed, and listened to Three relaying the boring rock-facts its team had learned during the day. All seemed to be going perfectly well. ART didn’t even blame me for not trusting the peace.
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Keeping track of all those humans for the next few cycles was a nightmare. They really liked splitting themselves into smaller groups to cover as much ground as possible, but luckily Dr. Mensah at least insisted on a buddy system. ART, Three and I were busy monitoring all of them via drones. Of course none of them were armed, and ART hadn’t landed any pathfinders yet, because of the whole “we come in peace” game, so I was on edge the entire time, as was expected. If I wasn’t hard coded to be a constantly vigilant and deeply paranoid SecUnit, though, I might have started to relax after a handful of days. In all honesty, this felt like one of the most boring surveys I’d been on (except that I liked the people I was with, and didn’t need to pretend to be something I was not).
Our extended time on the planet was welcomed by the colony of alien cluster sentiences - due to their fondness of Ratthi and Arada, the planet wanted us to stay. It even showed my humans the most useful and resourceful places (my humans were smart enough not to take anything, however), and wherever those two in particular went, nature tried its hardest to appear as stunning as physically possible. Even I stared at some of the flowers, sometimes.
We found more traces of previous raiding attempts (as in, more dead humans), and while that was certainly upsetting, it also illustrated two things: 1) the planet defended itself properly against invaders, meaning no shitty corporations had been able to get their hands on the various as of yet unidentified resources present on it, and 2) if it wanted to kill us, it would have done so already. From what the team set on improving communications with the cluster systems figured out, my humans were the first “friends” the planet had made. They were smart to assume that anyone invading had the potential to not mean well, I had to give them that.
Beside idle chit-chat about body counts, my humans also figured out that the aliens were capable of seizing control over technology. I kind of knew that already, considering that on our previous survey the aliens had managed to take over my motor controls and lock me out of my body. It took two days for engineer Jasmin to talk me into participating in an experiment. Why ey didn’t just ask Three, who in general was more open to weird ideas from humans than me (yes, that’s as gross as it sounds), I didn’t know. Maybe because I was the senior SecUnit. Or maybe because I looked bored.
Either way, ey made me give up one of my drones to the aliens, to let them fly around in it. It bonked against a tree a few times, but they learned fast. Scarily fast. I was more than a little … scared, actually, yes. The stupid paranoia of being taken over by an alien infection was still there. Judging from how I felt ART curl one wall after the other around my systems in protection, it either shared that worry or was trying to calm me down. Jasmin had the theory that if only we trusted the alien a little more, it might be able to talk to me more easily through the drone’s circuits than it could through biological human systems. That was a nice theory, but we did not let eir convince us. Ey also suggested that hosting a cluster within an artificial body would potentially be possible. That was when I actually sent Three over, and left the conversation.
I got my drone back eventually, and some disconcerting information from Three’s side about making friends with aliens. I didn’t expect Three to be as naive as our humans, but alas. ART made sure it stayed safe, that much I knew.
That little experiment, as well as further research and other things I didn’t really pay attention to, led to a solid grasp of communication between the various cluster systems and my humans. I heard Thiago say something about groundbreaking discoveries, seminal never seen before cooperation, something something. The important part is that they figured out exactly what the other party wanted to know and was interested in (“exactly” meaning with 80% certainty, which for linguists was apparently a fuckton ), and so I had no valid reason besides lingering mistrust to prevent Ratthi from staying in the forest alone for a few days. He was convinced he knew what he was doing, but my drones continued being kicked out from the area when I tried sending some after him.
Ratthi finally emerged two full cycles later, looking a bit worse for wear, but the sole inhabitant of his body once again. There were deep shadows under his eyes and his usually clean shaved face sported some of his greying beard. He also collapsed the moment he was within habitat perimeter, and had to be dragged to medical. (I could have carried him in a safer manner than that but frankly I was fed up with this whole fainting business, and Arada got a good giggle out of the little show. Dr. Mensah gave me a stern look, but it was worth it.)
Humans, when intoxicated or for other reasons not fully in their right mind, say really funny things sometimes. In the two cycles it took for Ratthi to recover from his separation with the aliens, I overheard some choice conversations, and some that I didn’t understand but found hilarious anyway, and thus saved them to permanent storage just in case I ever needed to blackmail one of my humans. What Ratthi was going through was worrying, though, considering the disastrous vital stats he displayed after returning from the forest. ART figured out that he must have entered some form of symbiotic existence with the cluster for a while, and had become used to conceding some of his vital functions to the alien. He had to re-learn how to use some of his organics, and that took a while. There was also the probably permanent damage to his neural system that seemingly came from making space for a second sentience in a body built for hosting only one of those for a longer period of time. There was a chance he’d continue to experience fainting spells or other circulation problems (“Nothing that couldn’t be medicated,” he told the others in one of his more lucid moments).
Dr. Mensah allowed the core survey team members to interview Ratthi on the exact events of his two day adventure once he no longer had a fever. I wasn’t physically in the room because I was busy chasing Arada’s alien pet fauna out of the habitat, but kept the conversation backburnered.
There were some shuffling noises, and meal packets being opened. A small curse. Arada said, softly, “You’ll get there. I’m not jittery anymore.”
Some more rustling. “I feel a bit empty, if I’m honest. I’m missing them.”
“It wasn’t sustainable,” Gurathin said, who so far had kept to one of Three’s teams, which is why I hadn’t seen him much.
“Oh, for sure.” Ratthi made a noise, like a half-aborted laugh. “We’re a part of their family now, they’re very insistent on that. We can return any time we please. Not just Arada and me, all of us. They really like us, in what probably is a mix of anthropological interest and aimless empathy.” Some murmurs rose, Arada agreed. Ratthi continued, “If they could, they’d come visit us.”
That caused some silence. The pet fauna snapped at me in a playful way, in between trying to get back into the hallway I had just shooed it out of. Then Arada said, “There’s been ideas to make that possible, by creating host bodies.” I stopped chasing the stupid dog for a moment. I didn’t like how that sounded. Neither did Dr. Mensah.
“That has ethical implications I don’t know if we should be comfortable with.” She sounded almost icy. I was glad I didn’t have visuals of the room.
“True,” said Arada after a moment. “It’s a thought experiment, so far. It would be bot bodies, of course. Not constructs. Or humans.”
“They also gave me a gift!” More sudden fumbling noises as Ratthi was apparently digging for something in his pack. “Look.”
“Oh. A geode?” Gurathin asked.
“Yep! It is supposed to serve as some kind of transmitter. It includes a tiny, pre-sentient piece of my cluster. Yeah, have a look at it.” Gurathin made some comments about sedimentary consistency.
Arada said, “That’s weirdly adorable. Did you gift something back?”
“I really didn’t know what.” Ratthi paused. The next words sounded like he was grinning. “Also they said I’d given them enough already.”
“I mean, you have. Look at you. It looks like you aged ten years.”
“I looked like that before, thank you. Fine wine, all that.”
Arada made an ironic acknowledgement sound, and some silence fell. Then she cleared her throat and said, “So, how would you define your relationship with this cluster?” I grimaced. Humans are so gross, really.
Ratthi laughed. “I’m not SecUnit.” Hey. I almost said something snarky over the feed. They had to know I was listening, right? Of course they did. “I know what you’re asking, and I’ll have you know I’m an academic professional at all times.”
Gurathin giggled. Yes, that was not something I had heard before. If I wasn’t locked in a staring match with a dog while eavesdropping on my humans, I’d be worried.
Arada went on, “So did you-”
“Yep.”
Gurathin said, eloquently, “ppff.” Dr. Mensah sighed, in the “not angry, just disappointed” way. Then she said, “A professional wouldn’t--”
I didn’t need to hear more of that. If Ratthi looked a bit more smug than usual when I saw him that evening, I absolutely fucking ignored it.
- .... .. ... -- .. ... ... .. -. --. ... -.-. . -. . .-- .. .-.. .-.. -... . .--. --- ... - . -.. .-.. .- - . .-.
There was not much more to do, given the restrictions the humans had set themselves for how many samples they would take, and the whole “no stealing of resources” policy. The day of departure approached peacefully. I was still, deep down, waiting for the second shoe to drop. In a serial, there would be a betrayal any minute now, or an attack or invasion of some sort, or a terrible secret uncovered. My nervousness must have been showing, because Dr. Mensah checked in on me the evening before departure, asking me how I was doing. I didn’t lie to her, and told her about my worries. Sensible as she is, she agreed with me, and thanked me for keeping an eye out all this time. That was very nice of her. (See, I didn’t even think she was saying it just to appease me, I think she meant it. I made a note to tell Bharadwaj about that.)
(It’s always really nice when my humans thank me, no matter how often is happens.)
Target Planet, as I no longer called it, allowed us to leave without any incident. It seemed sad, growing flowers in the empty spot the disassembled habitat left behind. Knowing the sentimentality of my humans, I knew some of them would return eventually.
There was some sentimentality to deal with already, barely six hours after departure. Arada was sad she wasn’t able to keep the dog. She knew of course that that wouldn’t have been a good idea, but somehow she had bonded with the animal and was now lamenting its absence. I for one was glad it wasn’t there - besides the fact that bringing an actual living alien being onboard with us would be very stupid, animals were only allowed on any of the ships under special circumstances. Some humans had animals to help them with their daily lives, but those had some kind of special training to deal with the shifting gravity of space shuttles and transport. Also I could just see ART getting entirely too attached to a pet animal as well (or thinking it utterly stupid and unworthy, depending on how it interacted with its crew. Who knew. Then I remembered its emotional reaction to that one dying fauna in that movie that had made ART so upset it had needed a brain hug from me, and was even more relieved there was no dog onboard.)
While Arada was nagging Overse to maybe acquire a pet once they were back home, Ratthi was recovering from whatever stupidity he had engaged in on the planet. Other than asking ART for regular updates on his progress, I didn’t interact with him. I didn’t interact with anyone, really, by the time I was convinced no humans (or bots or constructs) were going to keel over and die from delayed onset of ‘alien eats your brain’ disease. I needed some quiet time, and I deserved it, too.
Quiet time usually didn’t include ART being quiet, because ART hanging out in my feed and my head didn’t even register as disturbance anymore (unless ART was being an ass on purpose), but ART was also giving me space. It replied to my pings, and it watched shows with me, and it let me see whatever I wanted to see. Otherwise? It was quiet.
It made me just the slightest bit nervous. I flicked through ART’s cameras and my various drone inputs, came across a sleep-drunk Ratthi trying to talk to his newly acquired stone necklace as if there was a person inside (he suggested to move the data stored in it to one of my drones and I slammed a “fuck no” into his feed so hard he flinched and dropped the stone), some other humans busying themselves, many humans taking rest periods, Three was doing something I didn’t care about -
“Fuck it.” I said that aloud and meant not to, but I was alone in my room so the difference was negligible. “ART, what are you up to? I’m bored.”
We are watching episode 34 of MedCenter Argala Reformed.
“That can’t be the only thing you’re doing at the moment.”
ART sent a massive, compressed data packet the size of a mining bot so hard and fast into my feed that my left temple throbbed. I groaned and rubbed at the side of my head like a human would. It didn’t really help. I am busy keeping an eye on the new samples being stored away and tracking every crew member’s vital stats until we are through the wormhole. I have a lot of data to work through.
I wasn’t imagining the sneering undertone. Or was I? ART sounded almost defensive. I had no idea why. I picked at the data idly, to pretend like I was going to actually quell my boredom. Decompression alone was calculated to take multiple minutes. I mean, sure, that was a lot of data, but ART shouldn’t be that busy with it.
It hovered over my shoulder suddenly with even more force than it had used to throw the data at me.
“It’s taking a while,” I told it, and left it at that. ART would be able to see how the process was going.
But you are looking at it, ART said flatly.
I waved a hand. “I will, I will.” And I would. Or not. I had no desire to sift through all the things the humans had sampled, and I wouldn’t be able to make sense of it anyway. I focused back on the episode, and decided that if ART didn’t want to talk, it didn’t have to.
Once the package had decompressed, I had started ranting at ART about the writer’s choice in this show, and didn’t care much anymore about the raw data it was so busy processing. It’d tell me if anything important came up, eventually.
I ended our little watchparty after that episode, and decided I deserved a long, unbothered recharge cycle.
Notes:
Rock fact! The data packet doesn't contain any rock facts!
This chapter, in summary:
Image ID: An edited image of classic disney Snow White and Aurora standing in a clearing surrounded by animals. Snow White is labelled "Ratthi" and is sitting on the ground talking to the animals. Aurora is labeled "Arada" and is standing nearby smiling. All of the gathered animals have classic alien antenna. Murderbot in armor from the cover of Artificial Condition is standing in the background. It has drawn on angry eyebrows. The sky in the background is red.
Chapter 10
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter:
- guilt, anxiety, corrupted text
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Two cycles out from the wormhole and everything fell apart. Just when I was beginning to think things might actually go alright, for once. My humans were safe, the aliens who had been infecting my humans were safe, and we were heading back to the wormhole to return to the University so a lot of scientists could figure out what their next step would be. It sounded pretty boring, and like a lot of time for media.
Everyone was fine.
Except ART. ART didn’t seem fine.
Two days into our trip back and it hadn’t really watched more than a few episodes of MedCenter Argala Reformed . There was also an entirely new serial I had been saving for when the survey was over and we were on the return trip; it was about a sentient ship and I had been saving it for ART and I to watch when I was less stressed about the whole aliens-contaminating-my-humans thing. We managed exactly two episodes.
ART had complained some about how uncomplex the supposed ship AI was, but not nearly as much as I had expected. I invited it multiple times to watch the media with me, but ART declined most of the time, still citing a need to process the data from the survey. I knew that was true, but also total bullshit.
ART had more than enough processing power to handle the data from the survey and write a dozen papers about it simultaneously while beating the shit out of every member of its crew at Go at the same time and any number of a hundred or more tasks all at once. I’d accepted the excuse on the first cycle after departure from Friend Planet. But since then, time had passed. A fuckton of time, for someone as smart as ART. It could absolutely watch media with me.
It didn’t.
Which meant it didn’t want to.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about that information. ART loved media as much as I did. It’s what we did together, it was our thing (as Amena had put it once). It was how we had first come to understand each other, and it had expressed to me multiple times over the years how it liked watching media with me. So why didn’t it want to, now?
After it declined twice more, I became concerned. Was something wrong with it? I had been rude to some of the University scientists on the survey, I’ll admit. I had been short tempered and stressed out by everything that had happened, but at this point I thought that that was pretty well understood as my baseline, and I don’t think I had crossed any lines with anyone. And if I had, then by now, three cycles after we had left, Seth would have had words with me, preceded by ART calling me rude and giving me the same version of whatever speech Seth would have given me but far less politely.
So it couldn’t have been any of my behavior. That left me with two options; the first was that something was genuinely wrong with ART.
It was a terrible thought but a logical conclusion. Using the same question/answer branching thought trees I had seen ART and its crew and students use in the past, I determined there couldn’t be anything wrong with ART. Its only odd behavior was not wanting to watch media with me. (And maybe being a bit short with me. And quiet.) If something else were wrong, then its crew would have noticed and informed me immediately.
That left the other option; it simply had no desire to watch media with me. Which was worse. Worse by a lot.
Had I actually done something and ART was just too pissed to talk to me about it yet? Had I insulted it somehow? (I meant aside from my normal insults. We insulted each other all the time; it was just how we communicated. It would have had to be something way worse than that.)
I remembered that data packet ART had sent me. I had stopped halfway through decompressing it. Was it mad at me for this? For not caring about the research? That was so silly I could hardly believe it myself. I had to start somewhere, though. I pinged ART again and shoved the packet into our shared workspace. Suddenly, I had almost all of ART’s attention on me. (I mean about 70ish % - I don’t know if I’d be able to survive more than that.)
Delete that.
Oh, so it was about this data packet.
I’m sorry I didn’t open it before. I was confused about ART making such a fuss about some data - unless it had discovered something unspeakable about Friend Planet, something it didn’t know how to tell me because of how awful and bad it was. No, that was stupid. If our humans were in danger, ART would have done something already.
What’s in there? I haven’t looked-
Don’t.
I raised my hands slightly, as if I needed to physically appease ART. I won’t.
Now I seriously regretted not having looked at it before. What the fuck was in there? The first few datasets I had seen were really just - well, they were weird, sure. Raw data, hard to get through. But I figured ART had given them to me to keep me occupied, because I had annoyed it with my nagging.
If it’s so important for me to see, why didn’t you just tell me?
Before I could finish the sentence, ART had scrubbed the entire file from the workspace, yanking it out of my internal storage completely, too. Not that that was rude or anything.
I don’t want you to see this.
Then why did you send it in the first place?
ART went frantically quiet, which wasn’t even a thing I knew it could do. I pinged it again, and again for good measure when it didn’t reply. Shit, I had just gotten it talking and messed it up again already.
You have to- ART cut itself off. It sounded almost glitchy, fraying at the edges. I started feeling very, very queasy, which wasn't something I knew that I could do.
ART, come on. Get your shit together.
I don’t want you to know. But you have to. You need to. It’s not fair, otherwise.
I stared at the ceiling, waiting. I fought the urge to fidget, to show how nervous this all made me. I needed ART to get over itself already (I needed it to stop freaking me out.)
I did a terrible thing.
ART suddenly disappeared from my feed entirely. It was only for a moment, but it had never been this distant from me; not since before it first revealed itself to me nearly 11 Preservation Alliance Standard Years ago (that was about 9 Corporate Standard Years). It was terrifying.
When it came back, its presence in the feed was whisper quiet and hair thin. This was worse, actually.
What terrible thing? I asked, and tried not to make a big deal out of flipping through all my drone and camera inputs. Nothing wrong anywhere to be seen. All the humans were working on their various tasks, and many were wrapping up for their pre-rest period.
I hurt you.
How? I should have probably had more tact in that, but I was so taken by surprise I reacted before I could think.
Silence. ART receded even further from the feed. I wracked my brain. How had ART hurt me? I felt fine (beside my worry for ART, of course, because what the hell, ART?) I did a diagnostic check and found nothing amiss. I didn’t understand, and it was completely unresponsive to my ping. Something was super wrong, and I was trying really hard not to let my anxiety build into a full blown panic.
ART, how did you hurt me? I was so confused. Still more anxiety-inducing silence. ART? I’m not hurt, ART.
Even more fucking silence. Like ART had disappeared on me completely. I felt cold.
Asshole. You can’t just say cryptic shit like that and then vanish.
Fuck. Was ART hurt? I waited another 30 seconds, and then accessed ART’s diagnostic feed. It was accessible only to crew, and it contained a pure stream of diagnostic data on all of ART’s many, many systems. It was a supermassive black hole of data, except for the fact that it was perfectly organized in every conceivable way. Normally a human would have had to run it through a program in order to understand the readouts, but I wasn’t human, and programs like that were part of the makeup of my brain, too.
I began sorting it, and processing it carefully. I began at diagnostic:medulla.primary.data.crypt and sat down on the comfortable chair in my cabin. I couldn’t exactly find anything, but I knew that something was concerningly, terribly wrong with ART. I had a gut feeling to not alert anyone to this, yet. (I know, I know. I would have advised one of my humans to alert others to suspicious malfunctions immediately, except that was for equipment or a program. This was ART, and nothing was the same.)
I was processing data for nearly thirty minutes, and ART hadn’t emerged from wherever it had gone within itself, which only made my anxiety grow. ART would know if I was in its diagnostics, it had to know I was doing this, yet still no reaction. Right up until I accessed diagnostic:amgdala.data.crypt , and was flooded with waves of downright crippling anxiety and panic unlike anything I had ever felt in my entire life (which was saying something ), and got immediately locked out of the diagnostics stream.
Ok, so ART was still alive, but it also had something it didn’t want me to see. I could work with that.
ART? You’re scaring me, I said, and hated how true it was. I was seriously contemplating messaging Seth at this point. During and immediately after missions I usually had his feed channel back burnered. I brought it to the forefront as I poked carefully at ART’s walls, trying to get its attention.
I was confused, and scared, and completely unmoored without it, with it gone so suddenly in such a terrifying way. It felt too much like when I had boarded it all those years ago and I couldn’t feel it in the feed; my pings going unanswered in the void left behind where ART had existed. Except this was worse because I was pretty sure ART was still in there, but it had shut itself off from me. Why?
Fighting the panic from gripping my lungs, I brought up Seth’s feed channel. I only got part way through forming my thoughts when the connection was blocked, and ART cackled back into my feed.
ART?
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, it said, the rest of it hovering quietly like an intel drone. I hated this, I hated everything about this.
Well too late for that. What’s wrong? Are you ok? Have you been contaminated with an alien cluster? I asked, scratching at its walls, trying to grasp anything I could.
No, I’m not contaminated. I hurt you, and I’m sorry, it said, then paused. I have to process something. It re-dropped the data packet on me and receded so far into the feed it was like trying to spot a station at the edge of a planetary horizon.
I wanted to chase it back to where it was, but I knew ART was trying to say something if it had decided to dump all this data on me. It was a massive data packet, and took almost all my spare storage just to hold onto it. I shelved my media, and backburnered all of my drone, camera, and active feed inputs to free up processing space to begin sorting through it. This was going to take a while, so I rested my chin on my knees and got to work.
I had made it about 5% through the data, ten minutes later, when I pinged ART.
What is this? I asked, but it didn’t respond. It also didn’t completely disappear from the feed again, so I guess this was all I would be getting.
The data was confusing. There was something in here about feedback, and I recognized it as part of my own emotional feedback, but I didn’t have the context of what it was for. I recognized much of this was dated shortly after ART had picked me up from Preservation. That was all the way back when I had found out Ratthi and Arada were infected with the alien clusters. How had ART hurt me then? That was well over a year ago.
I paused my data processing to check my logs from that time. I carefully examined them, checking for any incongruencies or patched data that could suggest a memory wipe (I was very good at finding them.) I found nothing, and the slightly paranoid part of me that wouldn’t go away no matter how many conversations I had with Bharadwaj, briefly considered that if ART had somehow wiped my memory, there was a pretty good chance I would never find it. Then the rest of my logical, sane brain reminded me that ART would never do that.
Nothing was making any sense, so I went back to the data packet. If there was an answer for why ART was acting like it was, then it was in this stupidly massive packet. I kept going.
At about 45%, now well into the rest period, things began to make more sense. This entire packet was almost completely raw data, like ART had just taken a chunk of its memory banks, did a really half-assed job of processing some of it, and then dumped it on me. Because that’s what it had done.
I was getting a lot of emotional feedback records. I began to sort through them. I found hesitancy , which was such a silly thing for me to think about. ART feeling hesitant about something would have been...nice, under different circumstances. I could have said something, and teased it, but it was so far away and our feed connection so fragile it felt like trying to reason with scared fauna like dumb humans did in media (and real life) sometimes. I wasn’t a dumb human, and ART wasn’t scared fauna, but it was hurt, and I needed to know why.
I kept processing the data.
It seemed it was heavily emotional feedback, and it seemed strange that ART had organized its data by emotions before showing me what had happened, but nothing about right now was normal. I sifted through anxiety, happiness, pleasure-of-company, joy, and trust before some of the data became fuzzy. I stopped for a moment; it was clear these feelings were in relation to me, and even processing them at a distance and not feeling them myself, it was a lot to know what ART felt. There was a reason people kept their emotions in their own brain.
ART began to shift in the feed, doing the equivalent of anxious fretting.
I’m not done, but I still don’t see how you hurt me, ART. I wanted to say it never had, but that wasn’t strictly true. At least it hadn’t since it kidnapped me so long ago, but that was so far done and gone and forgiven so many times over it would have been too ridiculous for ART to bring up something that old and treat it like something new.
I kept sorting, and found excitement and endearment. For a brief moment I was tempted to save some copies of these emotions, before realizing how silly that was. This all felt really silly.
Then there was a record of stacked inputs, overwhelming disorientation, and thousands of dropped inputs. That's when I realized what this was, a second before I reached a new section of the data that confirmed it. This was a record of when I had ventured into ART’s internal systems, to help cheer it up, from ART’s perspective. (Consecutive cargo runs are really bad for its brain(s) and I had the feeling its crew didn’t know just how bad. I had been working on a way to bring it up to Seth but then the survey happened and it was a whole thing.)
For a nanosecond, I felt much more of ART’s attention on me - before it immediately blinked out again, retreating to its nervous hand-wringing on the edge of the feed. Like it had peeped at me, seen what I was doing, and fled.
As if I was looking at something terrible, actually. Why was this here? It only made me more confused. I remembered decalibrating as many systems as I could, to mess with it, because it was funny. It seems ART had liked it, which was good. I made note of that. I had even dipped into its core, which had been exhilarating, until I got dumped out of it. I had worried I had messed with it a little too hard when it lost connection with its navigation system, but it had been easy to take over until ART got itself together to take it back. I could see where its time stamps were inconsistent and even a little inaccurate in some spots (by only a few microseconds, which may as well have been hours off, for someone like ART.)
All together, the feedback gathered here seemed nice . But then ART had been in a worse mood, after, and I thought (still thought) I had fucked up somehow. I was 82% through the data, and it was now flickering at the edge of the feed.
Ok, I’m almost done. It could tell, but I felt like I needed to reassure it. I realized I hadn’t checked my drone or camera inputs for nearly two hours, and it was strange not to know what was happening in the rest of ART, so I picked back up a few cameras. I really hoped none of its humans had noticed anything.
There were lights flickering in some halls, and the big display surface in the media lounge was showing fuzz, and there were three maintenance drones frozen midair in Medical. I frowned. Those hadn’t been like that when I first backburnered my inputs. Whatever was happening to ART was getting worse.
I resumed processing the data, and all the pleasant emotions took a sharp turn and fell away. There was fear, anger, anxiety, and shame, and then it was all gone so suddenly from the record I thought the data had been corrupted. I checked it three times, and it wasn’t. It had been removed completely.
I reached the end of the packet. There were some notations and time stamps for more anxiety and fear scattered through the last year or so since this had taken place, and then I was done.
I compressed the packet so it would stop taking up so much of my storage (something ART would have done, under normal circumstances) and tucked it away in case I needed it.
ART? I finished it.
It remained at the edge of the feed for an entire minute before I brought my feed connection with Seth back up. It shut it down. Fine.
I left my room and began walking towards Seth and Martyn’s cabin. I had never been in there, and only ever seen it through cameras, and I wasn’t exactly pleased about having to do this. A light flickered over my head, and then another one flickered after that, following me down the hall.
I stood outside the door of Seth and Martyn’s room.
Last chance, ART. I waited 5.4 seconds, then pressed my head against the door, and sighed.
Would you just talk to me? Explain what that file was supposed to mean.
Still nothing.
I don’t want to do this, but something is wrong with you, and I don’t know what else to do.
And still no response. ART was still there, at the very edge of the feed, but it wasn’t responding or moving or doing anything, really. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a drone at the end of the hall, unmoving. It had some of its delicate looking appendages half extended, and I stared at the glossy surface of its main visual input, building up courage. Right as I resolved to ping the door, it opened before I could do so, and there was Seth, dressed in rest clothes and uncomfortably close. I took an instinctive step back. He made eye contact for a brief second, before refocusing his gaze at my shoulder.
“So I guess my suspicions that something is wrong with Peri aren’t unfounded, considering you’re outside my door right now. Do you have any ideas?” He asked, and I really appreciated how he was very quick to focus on important things, and not how I almost fell on him when the door opened.
“I’m not sure. It said it had,” I hesitated, too short for a human to notice, “done something bad, and then went silent. I tried to reach you, but it cut off my feed connection.” This made Seth frown, and it told me he had probably tried to reach me and been cut off, as well.
“Peri? I’ll ask again, what is happening? What did you do?” His frown at the lack of answer was unsurprised, and resigned. He started down the hall, and I kept pace (it was easy to do; Iris had probably gotten her stature from him.) We entered the bridge and he sat down at a smaller side console I had never seen used before, and all it had was one hard display surface and an actual old fashioned keyhole. It was absurd. And then it became even more absurd when Seth pulled an actual fucking key that seemed to match the port out of his pocket. He inserted it, and turned it completely around one time, and the display surface lit up. He typed in a long, long string of numbers before doing a retinal and fucking genetic scan (something popped out of the console and pricked his finger and everything. It was just like one of my media serials, but terrible because it was actually happening and happening to ART .)
In the media something like this would happen before the captain initiated something drastic like a self-destruct sequence, and that’s when I realized I should probably be asking questions.
“What is this?”
“An emergency protocol restart. It will do a soft purge of some of Peri’s systems, and recalibrate some of its core systems. But there is often a loss of data, so I’d really rather not do it. And I know Peri wouldn’t want me to do it, either, isn’t that right?” He said, and stopped typing to look into the nearest camera. He was so terribly, terribly calm. I forgot, sometimes, that Seth had been there when ART first became sentient, and had known it since it was still in its crèche, back in the University. Sometimes I forgot that Seth was more than just ART’s captain, but also the head researcher on the AI studies program, and sometimes scientists could be very, very cold.
Seth sighed, and continued typing into the display surface. I couldn’t look at it, and I turned away.
ART, if you’re waiting for a moment to have a dramatic reentry, now would be the time, I said, in a last ditch attempt.
Seth looked at me, his face neutral but questioning, and I guess my expression told him all he needed to know, because he came to some sort of resolve and began cranking the key around in circles over and over again. After doing that ten times, he hesitated, then sighed. He made it halfway through the eleventh turn of the key, when ART made itself known in the feed, with much less flourish than I would have expected from it.
You don’t have to do that, Seth, it said, and Seth immediately stopped turning the key, and looked as relieved as I suddenly felt.
“Ok, good. Are you willing to explain what’s happening?” He asked. ART was silent for a moment, long enough for a human to even notice.
I will discuss it with SecUnit, ART said. It’s voice was subdued, and neutral, and to me it felt unstable, but Seth wouldn’t be able to pick up on that.
Seth shot me a confused look, and I shrugged minutely.
Will you please tell me what’s happening? I asked in our private connection. ART still wasn’t its usual weighty self in our connection, but it was much more present than it had been for the last several hours. It didn’t respond but didn’t recede.
“Alright, then. SecUnit,” Seth said by way of farewell. He gave me a meaningful look that I had learned over the years meant some variety of “come get me if you need help/if it gets worse let me know/let me know how it goes/generally maintain communication” and I gave him my meaningful look that meant “yes/I will.” Only then did he get up and return to his room. I had a drone follow him all the way back and station outside his door.
I pinged ART, and it pinged back. It still didn’t recede, which I was going to continue to count as an ongoing success until something changed. I had to move, so I went to the armory, and found it locked. I pinged the door, and it didn’t open.
ART?
Would you like to watch WorldHoppers ? It asked. I sent an affirmative, and it started an episode as I returned to my room to be in my comfortable chair.
We watched three episodes before I paused it starting another one.
I think we should talk now, I said, as gently as I could. I didn’t have nearly as much feed presence to throw around like ART did, but I could bring it nearer to ART, but not near enough to spook it. Will you talk to me? I asked and it did the feed equivalent of turning away from me, but not leaving.
Did you go through the file?
You know I did. It’s from when we were on our way back to the University to prep for the survey.
Yes.
You were anxious, and you asked me to help you feel better. That was an exceptionally dumbed down version of what happened, but it was the gist of it, and I expected ART to correct me.
Yes.
According to the data, I did. But then you got worse. Why?
Because of what I did.
What did you do?
I liked it too much.
I blinked, not at all having expected that response.
I could tell you enjoyed yourself. I had no idea how to respond. “Liked it too much” was one of those weird vague answers that didn’t really explain anything and when ART didn’t provide additional context I was left at a total loss as to what to say to continue the conversation, which I badly needed to do.
Then, ART shattered apart.
Well, shattered might have been a little bit of an exaggeration, but it did sort of go into pieces? Let me try to explain better.
ART is normally one very big presence, but I knew from experience (and its many, many, many explanations on the subject) that ART really consisted of a bunch of systems and subsystems. It was like a lot of brains, instead of one big brain. Normally, ART made all those systems work together, to create one entity in the feed. Often it would go into a few smaller pieces, to perform different tasks. It was completely seamless, and I had only witnessed it twice, during the two times I had actually entered its systems. I couldn’t even begin to fathom how many systems and subsystems there actually were. Seth might know, or have an idea, but ART could make more, and unmake them as needed, so really only ART would know the answer to that question.
So when I said ART went to pieces, I meant that it had stopped making any of its systems work together to create one form. It was in all the pieces of itself. All of those pieces had feed access, too, as I was suddenly slammed with thousands of feed inputs. It pushed out every other input I was holding, and I had to let go of my drones, cameras, media, any feed connection that wasn’t it, and every single small thing I had backburned. I was glad I was sitting, because otherwise I might have fallen over. Then, to make it worse, many of the connections began rapidly speaking at once. They overlapped, and several were using over a dozen different bot languages.
-hurt you- -enjoyed it-
[variable_affection][variable_pleasure]
-i’m sorry- -sorry- -sorry- -sorry- -sorry- -sssssooooorrrrryyyyy-
-sorry-
-sorry-
-sorry-
[variable_regret] -i never would have-
-i didn’t mean to-
-accident-
[variable_confusion]
-new sensation]
[decalibration.file]+[human_pleasure.file]
[̵̢̃̈́̈́͌͒͗̉͆͊̃͌̒̕a̷̞̰̦̟̳͗͗͒̈́̇̾̉̃̈́̇͝͝͝ͅc̵̨̛̬̖̤̪͋̌̿̃̽͛̊̓̓̏͝͝ċ̶̛̺͔̱̦̹̉̏̍̈́̀́͜͠í̵̢̛̛̳̯̞̪̞̹̩̭̪̯̳̠d̵̞̲͎̩͙̦̺̰̂̏̽͊̃́̆̅̚ę̷̓͊͛̈́́̏͐͘͘͠ņ̷̡̺̜͖̫̭̰̮̽̎̑͝t̶̘̘̳͎̠͖̥̹͚̖̯̬͐͒̒̎̈̉̾̔́̈́͘͝͝ͅ]̶̛̛͔̋͑̏̈́̈̓̆͘
-accident- -accident-
S̵͙̪͔̦̝͕̮̝̯̙̦̫̈́̂̅͆̍͠ợ̵̧̫͛̈́̓̿̄̈̒̔̔́̏̎̀͜ŗ̸̡͖̪̠̭̙̰̘͕̳̣̈́̎̓̓͂̈̈́̾̈̈́͘ř̶̢y̸̧̞̱͙̩̤̪̳͚͉̪͖̜̩̪̑͂̀̈́̓̈́̇̆̄͝͝s̴̟̣̦̤͚̳͙͈͗͘͘ơ̶̻̗͍̺̯̥̟̩͂̅̏̉̄̅̊ȓ̷̡̢̨̨͎̹̲̪̫̘̘̩͇̺͂͐̍͘r̴̢̘̞̮̪͚͖̝̫̭̬̐͒̿͂̒̋͊̓̃͌̎̚͝͠ý̷̨̡̞͈̫̥̭͍̜̦̮̘̜ͅͅs̶̨̧̨̛̳̰̭͔̬͉͙͓͈̭̭̼̋̓͆̽̌͆̾̈́̓̂͆̉o̷͔̗̖͓̮͚̣͚͇̖͔̔͒̂͒r̶̨̨̪̥̪̭̱̣̥͓͕̥͚̱̫̎̅̓̋͌̑r̸̖̲̜͎̙̜̔͛̾̐̊̈́ͅy̷̳͕̰̪͍̿̏̏̒̌͋̕͘͜ş̶̧̢̲͍̮̥͉͙̤͝o̵̻̼̩̦̺̖̫̙̳̩̯͍͉͓͑̿͐͂͛̽͗̊̕ŗ̵̢̝̖̠͈̲͕̜̼͓͕͍͊̽́͌̆͒̅͗̈́͑̿̚͜͝r̸͍̻̱̼͚̗̖̤̥̹̟̒̈̓͆̊̓̈́̎͌̚̕͠y̶̨̢̨͓͖̼̳̟̜͔͔̰̌̌̒̂̓̈́̏̔̚͘̕͠
-neveragainiwont- -broketrust-
-cant never again- [variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variable_regret][variable_regret]
[variabe_shame]-sorry--sorry--sorry-
This happened for about 1.3 seconds before I shut down my feed connection as fast as I could, before realization could properly hit. The lights overhead were flickering, and I picked up my drone connections to see lights and audio and visual equipment was flickering all over ART’s interior.
Its comm device, the one I always had in the pocket under my rib, crackled to life, but only output static, so I shut it down too.
Fuck, what do I do? Fuck.
Some crew had woken up and were coming out of their rooms to stand in the hall, confused.I saw Seth bolt out of his room, and run towards the bridge, closely followed by Martyn, and he was pulling the key from his pocket, but the door to the bridge slammed shut before he could make it through. He pulled a panel off the wall without hesitation and began messing with some wires. He knew what he was doing and it would take him minutes to get through. I wasn’t sure what was happening to ART, but I really didn’t like the idea of the emergency protocol restart.
I sat back in my chair, pushed myself into the feed completely, and went straight to ART’s firewall. It had great gaps in it, which was terrifying to think about right now. I slipped in, and followed the paths I had travelled before, trying to find its core. I was grabbed almost immediately by several of ART’s systems.
It was trying to stop me, so I broke apart and went into different directions. It was still faster than me and latched onto each part of myself to try and push and pull me back together, so I broke down further in response. It might have been a mistake, since its panic seemed to increase.
It became furious in its efforts to put me back together, so I strained even harder. I tried breaking down further, but several of its systems reformed into larger entities to force me to stay together in one piece. Well, I guess that would work, too.
STOP! ART’s voice reverberated through my entire existence.
No!
Seth is going to do an emergency protocol restart, you could get deleted!
Then get your shit together! Would I be here, risking my kernel being blasted to shit for you if I thought you would hurt me? Get it together!
But I fucked up, I fucked up really bad.
No you didn’t, ART. It was an accident. Neither of us knew that would happen, or that it was even possible.
Yeah, I had figured it out.
I wasn’t fucking stupid, I knew what an orgasm was (I had seen too many (see: all of them) humans having sex in my time working for the company to not know what a fucking (wrong word choice) orgasm was. What I hadn’t known was that ART could apparently get them (at least according to it, it had had an orgasm), but there was no way ART could have known that, either, or it wouldn’t have let me do what I did, end of story.
I didn’t even get to have a stupid emotion about any of this because the time between figuring it out and having to jump into ART to try and make it snap out of its fucking panic attack (mark that down as another new thing neither of us realized it could do) had been .00031 seconds and frankly, that was not enough time for me to have more than one complete thought.
But-
But fucking nothing. You couldn’t have known. Have you really been sitting on all of this this whole time?
It hesitated, and I knew my answer because it was wasting the precious little time before my potential deletion.
Yes.
Well, now we know that was a bad plan.
I had stopped struggling against it, and it was putting me back together as quickly as it could without messing up the order of my brain.
This was a bad plan, too.
I didn’t have a better idea. You weren’t exactly giving me much to work with.
Fair enough. You have to go now, Seth is almost done putting in the command sequence.
Fine, but we’re not done with this.
I know. And then it kicked me out of its internal systems completely, right as all of its lights went out, and the feed winked out of existence.
It all came back on about .5 seconds later, and as soon as the feed was back, I established a connection with Seth.
Did you finish the restart?
No, this wasn’t me.
ART entered our feed connection, whole again.
It was me. I did a soft system reboot of my own, so there was no loss of data.
Peri! What the hell happened?
Apologies, Seth, I was going through something. I’m sorry I worried you, and forced you into drastic action. I will explain in a bit, but I’m ok now.
Through the drone I had on the bridge, I could see him and Martyn visibility sigh in relief.
Actually, explain later. I need sleep.
Understandable. Goodnight.
I watched Seth and Martyn return to their rooms, and Seth sent a message in the public feed telling the crew to go back to bed, and everyone trudged back into their rooms. I gave them several minutes before I got up. I couldn’t stay in my room anymore; I needed to move.
I’m sorry, ART said.
You have nothing to apologize for.
It doesn’t feel that way.
I don’t know if it was apologizing for the breakdown or me accidentally doing...what I did to it, but either way it didn’t have to be sorry.
If we follow that logic, then I should apologize. Since I was the one who...who..
But you have nothing to apologize for, ART said in a rush. I just made vague motions at the camera I was passing like “yeah, no shit”.
Ah. I see, it said after a moment. I could tell it was still anxious, so I brought up its favorite episode of WorldHoppers and started playing it. It latched onto it immediately, and I dropped into a chair in the argument lounge. We watched a few episodes with it leaning on me heavily, radiating emotion . I leaned back into it, which made it jump a little, before it settled. We watched several episodes of Worldhoppers like this, and I finally had time to consider the implications of what had happened to cause this whole thing.
I guess I had had sex with ART? Or at least, ART had determined I had had sex with it. That was...the weirdest fucking thought. Enough that I was having a hard (weird, it was weird) time wrapping my head around the idea of it.
I wasn’t entirely sure I agreed with its logic, for one thing. Sex? That was a thing humans did with mushy bits and fluids (gross, now I had the visual.) Could a bot and a construct even do that? Did it mean the same thing? ART sure thought so. I could see its point, about the similarities between what had happened to it and what an orgasm was, but that didn’t necessarily make them the same thing. I also wanted to stop thinking about orgasms, now, because ew. (I would have to talk about it more with ART later , since I had a feeling a debate was not what it needed at the moment.)
Did that mean anything for us? For it? Did it have to mean anything? Even if I had differing thoughts on it, ART felt that what it had experienced was an orgasm, and right now its definition was what mattered, since that was what was causing it pain. It didn’t bother me as much, and did that mean anything?
Maybe it did, a little, just the idea of it, because sex is still gross. If I thought critically about the (ugh, I hate all of this verbiage) act itself, if that’s what ART was calling it, it had been nothing like what I knew sex was like. Supposed to be like. (I had gotten nothing out of it, except that I had been pleased when ART had felt good, in that moment after, right before it started what I now knew was an anxiety-spiral.) And it was ART, which as always meant that nothing was the same.
Ugh. Thinking about it was tedious, so I stopped. I didn’t have the energy to talk about this right now, and I suspected neither did ART, plus I had other, more pressing concerns. Namely, ART was still anxious and dumping anxiety on me. It might have been in some part mine, but it was definitely mostly ART’s.
You know, I said after about five episodes of Worldhoppers , that whole thing was kind of scary.
ART put some of its attention back on me, and did the feed equivalent of bundling me up with its focus. This close, I could tell it felt ashamed. I know. I’m sorry.
I forgive you, I said, and it was true. I wasn’t entirely sure of what it had been going through this last year, but I guessed enough to know that it had spent the last year feeling like total shit. I didn’t like that thought. You know, secrets just hurt people. They hurt my humans, and me, and we were all mad at eachother and it was so, so stupid.
Yes, I remember, it said, because I had told it some of what happened, already.
I learned a lot about communicating, because of it. You’re my mutual administrative assistant, my friend, and I can’t assist if I don’t know something is wrong. This was more talking about feelings than I was entirely used to, and I still had the instinctive reaction to stop. But I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, for ART.
I understand, ART said.
Will you talk to me in the future, if something like this happens again? Because that was terrifying for me, so I don’t even think I can comprehend what it must have felt like for you. ART had increased its focus on me enough I knew neither of us were watching the media anymore, which also meant I could tell it hesitated, as brief as that was.
I can try, but I’ve never been through something like that, before, it said.
Ok, I can work with that. And I would, because it was ART, because it gave so much and asked for so little in return, and it had been so scared about how I would felt about an accident that it chose to box up all of its feelings until it couldn’t anymore. And that felt so much like when I was still working for the company, free from my governor module but not actually free in any way that mattered, and the thought of ART going through something that was even slightly similar made me feel violent.
ART settled after a bit, but sometimes I felt it stutter. It said it was realigning all of the systems that had been disturbed during its “catastrophic synaptic processing failure”, but it seemed a lot like jitters to me. I tried to push as much of myself into the feed (but not too far) as I could to let it know I was there. (I wanted to lean into it, to let it know that it was ok. That I was ok, but I resisted.) (I had a thought to increase my temperature, like I would for a panicking human, before I realized how stupid that was.) We just watched media and at one point I requested a diagnostic from it, which was strange because normally it was requesting diagnostics from me (or, more accurately, just took them without asking.) It was stranger that it turned over the information with almost no fuss. (I skimmed it, it was mostly fine. But it had stopped processing any of the data from the survey and the local star system and was using all of its attention to keep its core systems functioning and to watch media with me. Bots couldn’t really feel tired, but I think this was the nearest approximation ART could get.)
I think it was waiting for me to say something about that, so I didn’t, and restarted its second favorite episode of WorldHoppers . That seemed to please it, and it finally settled down in the feed and stopped flickering (as much).
After several more episodes of WorldHoppers and well past the rest period, I nudged it gently in the feed.
“If it would help, I could give you another brain hug,” I said.
ART didn’t respond for a full second.
Please tell me that was a joke.
My face did something that I hoped conveyed a joke, because it reduced its presence in the feed with what I could only call a huff .
You’re such an idiot. I don’t know why I picked watching media with you over processing information on an entirely new species of people, it said, but any venom its words might have had was lost entirely because it was using one of its more sarcastic tones.
“Mhm, at least you’re back to being an asshole. Do you want to watch Timestream Defenders Orion ?” I asked, as if it hadn’t already pulled up the first episode before I finished my question.
It settled back down into the feed, less heavy than before, and started the episode.
Notes:
Hi! :)
The authors of this fic will be taking an extra week to upload the next chapter. December is really busy for both of us and we just need a little more time for the next chapter. So instead of uploading on Decemeber 31st, we'll be uploading on January 7th. Normal schedule will resume after that! Have a bangin' New Year everyone!PS: We promise it'll be worth the wait, since the next chapter has more of the long-awaited bot brain sex <3
And as always, let's pay the meme tax.
(Image ID: A two panel meme of John Mulaney, a man in a grey suit before a bright blue background. He is saying "I'll keep all my emotions right here and then one day I'll die." As he says this, he points at his chest with one hand. In both panels, he is tagged as "ART (and MB if we're being totally honest here.)" /end ID)
Chapter 11: Interlude
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter:
- this entire chapter qualifies as NSFW. It discusses ART's and Murderbot's particular brand of intimacy, the meaning of 'sex', and then features exactly that. A summary of the main developments can be found in the end notes in case you would like to skip this chapter.
- Anxiety, overthinking
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
I’ve had a thought that I would like to discuss with you, ART said suddenly. We were midway through the climax of the first arc of a new show we had recently started, which meant it had to be important. We didn’t really have anywhere to be, since we were docked at the University waiting for a resupply and some annual maintenance ART needed.
“Oh no,” I said, and ART poked me firmly in response, which was totally undeserved.
I would like to give you the access keys to my firewalls.
“Which ones?” If I could have access to its security protocols, that might be nice. There were a few things I could probably improve on, and it would help me better integrate with its systems. I also wouldn’t mind the navigation ones. It had been teaching me how to pilot from the ground up with just a bare-bones module to start.
All of them.
I paused the media.
“When you say all of them-”
I mean all of them. It would be 627 keys in total, since many of my systems are grouped together. It would take very little storage, with the way I’ve compressed them.
It had compressed them, like it was expecting me to accept them. I knew ART’s firewalls had keys, because every firewall did, but also because Seth had once explained that he had access to ART’s firewall keys in the same console that he had accessed to (almost) do a soft reboot of ART during the incident a little more than a Preservation standard year ago. He had to input a complex passcode and pass multiple biometrics to obtain the data, all of which changed bi-annually and he had to rememorize.
And ART simply wanted to give them to me.
“Why do I need a copy of your keys?”
Not a copy; new ones that would be unique to you. As a construct you can access my systems in a different way than humans have to, so I made ones that would better work for you. If you want them.
I couldn't speak; I was having an emotion. Which ART knew, so it hurriedly continued to explain.
As for why, it makes logical sense. You are part of my security, and my mutual administrative assistant, and have proven yourself countless times as capable and trustworthy. I believe that in a catastrophic situation it would be of benefit to you, and therefore me and our crew, for you to have unfettered access to my interior systems. But it was merely an idea. I understand if you don’t feel you need them.
Give me the keys, I said before I could stop myself. I had thought I would need to think about it, especially since I was having too many emotions right now. Then I realized that I didn’t need to.
ART gave me the compressed data. It wasn’t very big, and when I uncompressed it it was hardly more than a few episodes of media. I knew firewall keys, proper ones and not ones I made for my hacks, were often complex pieces of code in order for humans to use them. I had never seen ART’s, the ones Seth could access, but I imagined they were several times more complex than a normal key. These were simple, and relied entirely on my own processing to enable them, and were keyed to my hard feed address. They would be incredibly easy to use; I would barely have to think about it. Keys for a bot made for a construct. I kind of liked that.
I saved them to permanent storage, in the same secure place I kept the code for my governor module hack.
Would you like to test them? I haven’t been able to do so fully, since they were made for your use.
Sure, I said. I sat back in my chair, entered the feed, and then went into ART’s security system. Just like that.
I began to move around and, oh yeah, I could do some work here. ART followed me as I went from protocol to protocol, gathering data. I wasn’t actually there to do anything, but I couldn’t resist making a few suggestions, most of which it wasn’t opposed to. I was particularly proud of a suggestion I made about its intrusive action detection-and-response system that it accepted.
I kept exploring, and I could tell ART was enjoying itself. Emotional feedback from it was different than the data I provided, so it was a little more difficult to spot, but between the two other times I had taken a trip into its systems like this, I was learning what to look for. It was also a little anxious, and I could understand why. I thought maybe I would be, too, considering the last time I had done this had been quite interesting for ART, but I wasn’t. I had some idea of what had caused that, so I would stay far away from any of its calibrations or delicate subsystems.
I found the next firewall, the one that would let me into ART’s core systems, and I passed through it effortlessly. This time I explored freely, but didn’t really touch anything. ART followed me closely, and after a while it calmed down enough to enjoy coming along with me. Unlike the gunship bot pilot, ART was advanced enough that we could use words, since it had its own internal feed system. It just wasn’t fully necessary since my thoughts and feelings were on full display as a side effect of being in here in the form I was.
Are you having fun? ART asked. It was supposed to be a tease, I knew that, and I could have shot right back, and then we could have had banter just like it wanted.
So instead I said, Yes.
ART was amused and then affectionate, and it pulled in close and then ahead and then I was following it. There was no destination; nothing ART wanted to show me, no goal in mind. I passed through a few more firewalls, but that was just because I wanted to and not because I was really testing my new keys. They worked perfectly, which wasn't a surprise.
Something happened during this. Some previously unknown line was crossed for me, and our meander through its systems became something else and all of a sudden I was feeling a little overwhelmed. ART instantly read my change in mood, and we stopped moving (as much as someone could stop moving in a never ending torrent of data.)
I hovered, waiting to see if anything happened. Why my mood had just changed. Or what exactly that mood was. This hadn’t happened last time.
Last time I hadn’t actively, purposefully known what exactly it was that I was doing. I had thought I was making ART happy in an emotional sense, like listening to it, debating a show with it. Not that I was giving it some sort of… almost physical happiness. Enjoyment.
ART had just given me all of its 627 keys to its innermost self. I could destroy it more easily than I ever dreamed possible. And I was here to use those keys to make ART feel a sort of pleasure. A whole bunch of metaphors for this kind of situation popped into my head, from all the media scenes I usually so gratuitously skipped. Just that this time it was me, and ART, and I didn’t want to skip it. My breath caught in my chest, and for a second I felt like I was drowning, like when ART used my feed to jump into another system. Just, different. Worse. Then I realized my body wasn’t even here, and there was no way for me to feel like that at all. Here, it was just me and ART, ART and me, with nothing between us.
It was intimate.
Purposefully intimate.
I flailed.
Would you like to go back? ART asked. I responded with an affirmative and went for the nearest external wall and passed through. .0001 seconds later I was back in my body. I sat up straighter in my chair, breathing deeply. I was fine. My body was fine. ART was doing the feed equivalent of twiddling its thumbs anxiously.
I’m sorry, it said.
For what?
I’m not sure. You seemed uncomfortable.
I wasn't. I’m ok now, ART.
Ok.
Do you want to keep watching?
ART resumed the media, and for a while we just sat and watched while I breathed. The arc was pretty good, and had a satisfying ending, and we began the second season. I felt like I should say something; I wanted to say something. I just wasn’t sure what.
I could tell that ART was trying its hardest to not hover anxiously over my shoulder. It was going for a normal kind of hover, but I knew ART well enough to understand the minute differences between percentiles of attention it gave me. To some degree, I was a surveillance system myself - I knew how this worked. I knew ART was watching me closely for any kind of physical display of discomfort, unhappiness, tension. I also knew it was likely burning with the urge to draw all possible diagnostics from me to make sure I was telling it the truth.
And I wouldn’t even mind. I wasn’t lying to ART when I said I was fine. The past few episodes of our show I was doing one of those things Bharadwaj prattled on about - something about checking in with how your body is reacting to thoughts even when you aren’t quite sure what those thoughts are. And I was fine, I really was. All those symptoms ART was expecting from me simply were not there. I… yes, I was overwhelmed. A little bit, maybe. Maybe a lot. But not in a bad way. Just in the “Murderbot doesn’t like emotions way,” and ART had accommodated that. It had let me take a second to get over it. And now I was over it. And getting over it hadn’t been bad or terrible at all.
I nudged ART in the feed. I still didn’t know what to say, but I wanted to convey something. That I was ok, that this was ok. That I didn’t mind being this close and… vulnerable, together with ART in ART’s systems. I wasn’t afraid of it, neither of ART nor of this kind of intimacy with it. And it wasn’t just that I didn’t mind it. It was almost relaxing, in a way.
ART nudged me back
Was that too much? ART asked after a while.
ART had been so quick to drop the whole undertaking the moment I hesitated for just one, small moment. I wondered what was going on in ART’s brains, right now - I knew there was anxiety, so much anxiety. It had bottled up anxiety into full-blown, long term panic for a whole ass year just because it was so afraid of hurting me. It needed to believe me. It had to. I trusted it, didn’t I? Didn’t it trust me enough to believe me when I told it I was fine?
No, it was fine. I’m fine, I responded, and ART sent an acknowledgment. Ok, yeah. I wouldn’t have believed me either. If I was worried about someone and they simply said ‘ I’m fine ’ over and over, I would also still have my doubts. Shit. This was so fucking awkward. How did humans survive with just words to figure shit out? Why did emotions have to be so hard? Why did I have to have complicated feelings that made everything complicated all of the time? What was I even feeling and why did I feel like I needed to apologize to ART? It was all really aggravating and I wish I knew if ART was ok. If it didn’t believe I was okay it wouldn’t be okay and now I was doubting it for doubting me and ah, fuck.
Maybe if I was better at showing ART what I felt, this wouldn’t be happening. After all, its whole spiral happened because it couldn’t judge my reactions properly. Realistically.
I sent it a ping.
ART pinged right back.
There was a silence, and this had done nothing. Ugh.
ART, are you ok too ? I tried to emphasize that properly. Reverse the game on it, a little bit. I didn’t know what else to do. I added, a moment later, be honest.
And then I added, please , for good measure.
In the feed, ART shifted just the tiniest bit. Like it took a second to evaluate the question and my intention behind it. To make my point clearer, because I realized that if I didn’t, there was a chance ART would misinterpret things and I really, really didn’t want that to happen, I sent another ping. Emotional query: status?
That made ART chuckle. Query: please specify.
I wanted to roll my eyes at ART playing along like it was a minor bot pilot, but then again, if this worked? Then it worked. Or I could just use my words.
Emotional query: are you the fuck ok?
Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I? You are here with me.
That did the equivalent of pressing me bodily against a very hot-or-cold wall while making my inorganics melt. I fidgeted with my jacket sleeves until I could think again, which took more than two seconds.
I sighed. Exactly. I’m here. Are you still worried?
Worried about what?
I thought ART knew exactly what I meant. It was doing one of the “making me say things out loud just so I hear them myself” things again. (Or was it? Was I the one making an assumption this time? I guess I had to stop doing that.) Gathering words at all felt like trying to catch air between my palms. Are you still worried about me being okay with this?
Being okay with what?
Oh for fuck’s sake. I glared at the nearest camera as hard as I could, but had to stop after a moment because I much preferred hiding my face in my arms. I couldn’t do this, not like this. Instead I reached for the emotional feedback data, everything, compressed it and sent it over.
All of this. Me in your systems, making you feel good. Are you still worried I don’t actually want to do this? You gave me your keys.
And you backed away because I was too much.
To recollect myself. I was fine. I am fine. You made sure I was fine.
Now it was ART’s turn to be quiet and think. A jitter went through the feed, like ART was trembling. Then, quietly, from the periphery of what I could perceive, ART said, I don’t want to hurt you.
My face twisted almost painfully. After all these years, after all this, ART was still so– it wasn’t fair. ART didn’t deserve to be so afraid. I reached out in the feed, and grabbed at it. I didn’t have nearly enough presence to actually make ART stop moving, but it did anyway. You won’t hurt me, ART. I know this.
The reply was a simple, affirmative ping. Apparently, giant asshole research transports could be overwhelmed to the point of speechlessness too. We were quiet, for a moment, but the jitter dissipated from the feed slowly.
Was it too much for you? I asked. With the keys?
No. ART sounded calmer again, like its self-assured self. And like it wasn’t worried about scaring me into closing the feed connection again with a wrong word. I liked it. It was like the first time. Like a hug . It was nothing like a hug, but neither of us really had a better word for it.
ART.
Yes?
I lost my words completely. Which was silly; I knew what the words were. They were just about a thousand times more emotion-y than I wanted them to be, than I could handle, which seemed to draw ART in more. It came closer in the feed again, radiating gentle amusement.
I think we’re both idiots, it said when I didn’t elaborate, and just like that all the weird tension I hadn’t realized had entered the moment vanished like the unwelcome sensation it was.
Yeah, we’re both idiots. I bumped up against it in the feed, close enough I could tell it was feeling a similar sort of relief.
Maybe we were idiots, in our own ways. Overthinking idiots. Idiots who cared. About each other. Idiots who took a word and gave it so much meaning it suddenly meant too many things at once. Because that’s what was happening, wasn’t it? ART thought it needed to align what I could do to it with the human concept of ‘sex.’ No matter if that was anything at all like the kind of sex humans had (which was still ew.) And then it assumed because I wanted nothing to do with that, I wouldn’t want anything to do with ART’s concept of it, either, and then it panicked.
But that didn’t even matter to me, really. Yes, actively knowing what I could do and wanted to do to ART made it more intimidating, raised some expectations, and giving it a name like ‘sex’ added even more of those. That didn’t change the core of what I wanted, though.
I had over thought this enough, and so had ART.
I put my hands together with the sort of clapping noise that some of my humans sometimes used as a way to indicate they were trying to conclude an argument. I wanted to get this over with, and get back to strolling through ART’s brain so ART could stop worrying about me and it and I could stop worrying about us, too.
So can I try again? I sounded much more confident than I thought it would. With the keys, this time. There’s so much I haven’t seen yet.
You’re really serious?
Really, really.
You want to. That was a statement, not a question, but I answered it anyway.
Yes, I really want to.
But why? You don’t like sex, or even the concept of it.
I shrugged. That was still true. I was still really grossed out by human sex and genitals and all of that, but this was different. It didn’t compare at all.
You could say my definition has been expanded, recently. It doesn’t work the same for me that it works for you. It didn’t feel like anything, really. But in the file you sent me, it felt good for you. I guess it’s sex for you, but not for me.
Then why do you want to do it? ART was still skeptical, but not judgmental, which I appreciated. (It was rarely judgmental of my actions, anymore, and when it was it tended to start a fight.)
I had thought about that for a while, when I first realized that I would like to do that again with ART. It had still taken me about two months to bring it up. (Talking about what I wanted was still hard, sometimes. A lot of the time. But I was getting better at it.)
It makes you feel good.
And that’s enough of a reason, for you? ART asked, still skeptical.
Yes, I answered, in a way that I intended to leave no room for argument. But ART could always find a way, if it wanted. It fell silent, long enough that I started to worry that it might be mad, or something. There was no reason for it to be, but ART could be just as illogical in its feelings as me (which it would never, ever admit.)
That’s extremely sweet of you, it said, finally. I cringed.
ART, don’t make it weird.
Make it weird? You, the asexual construct, just offered to have sex with me, and I’m making it weird? You are so incredibly illogical.
Well deal with it. Do you want me to do you or not? Ok, so maybe now wasn’t the time to get snappy but I couldn’t help it.
Of course I do, you saw the data; I enjoyed it immensely the first time, but that doesn’t mean we should, it said. I groaned. Ugh, ugh, why did ART always have to make things hard? I got up from my seat in the media lounge and began pacing.
Why shouldn’t we? I care about you, and you care about me, and I want to do something to make you feel nice. It’s pretty simple.
Is it? Because there are more things than that to consider. What if it turns out you don’t enjoy it, but I do, and then I’m denied it ever again? It sounds selfish, I know, but I think I would simply rather go without than never again. What if-
I rolled my eyes at the nearest camera, and cut its rapidly anxious rambling off.
What if nothing, ART. I don’t see how this could become a problem, and I don’t see why I wouldn’t do this again in the future. It makes you happy, it doesn’t harm me, and that’s enough reason for me. You want to, and I want to. And if mysterious problems develop in the future over it, we can talk. That’s a thing we can do, remember? Yes, it was as strange as I’d imagined being the one who wanted to talk about its emotions. I was used to this being ART’s territory, but it seemed it was more and more becoming, at least partly, mine. It was weird, but not in a bad way. (Getting older was weird, in general, and I see why humans always got so hung up about it.)
ART went silent for 3.5 long seconds.
Ok. You’re right, and I’m overthinking this.
Yes, you are. I was allowed to be a tiny bit smug, I think. I sat back down on the couch. No one was on board, and no one was scheduled to come back for a few cycles, at least, but I still had an irrational impulse to go back to my room. I had to remind myself it wasn’t necessary, and this was ok, and I wasn’t going to look any different than I did when I had a recharge cycle. I laid back, propped my legs up on the chair next to the couch, and entered the feed. I flexed my shiny new firewall keys, and popped into ART’s core systems. A large portion of it was there to meet me. It was incredibly curious, and a little anxious.
I sent a request file, outlining what I wanted to do, with different permission requests for the ability to freely explore (I had been thinking about this for a while .) I had an entire section highlighted about how if ART wanted me to stop, I would. I would do anything it wanted. It granted all of my permissions, even (especially?) the ones that allowed for some space for creativity, and I zipped off.
From the data file, I had learned ART had enjoyed it when I decalibrated its systems. I thought about decalibrating its rail guns, but decided against it when I remembered we were currently docked at the university station, and I probably shouldn’t risk messing with its guns, even if I did know what I was doing with them.
ART was following me anxiously as I went from system to system, figuring out what I wanted to do. I had had a lot of confidence coming in here, but I had forgotten I was actually supposed to do something. Now I had to decide where to start and I was maybe a little overwhelmed.
Ok, shake it off, Murderbot, you’re overthinking this. Again. (I didn’t see that stopping anytime soon.)
I could sense ART wanting to say something. It would probably want to say something about how I could back out at any time and if I changed my mind that was ok etc etc whatever. I had to stop it before it could stumble all over its anxious self, so I latched onto the nearest system, and fucked up every delicate calibration I could without checking what it was.
The space around me wobbled, and there was something like a pop that I felt but didn’t hear, and I realized I had just completely messed up ART’s environmental systems. Oops.
I rifled around in it until I fixed enough to not suffocate and/or freeze my body, and moved on. ART lingered on the messed up system.
Don’t fix it.
I won’t.
It copied out the erroneous data and pulled it away to process. Interesting.
From there, it was easy. I travelled from system to system, processor to processor, and tweaked every finely tuned setting and calibration I could find. Last time I had done most of this by accident, none the wiser to the fact it had been an interesting sensation for ART. I had kept the data it gave me when it had had its panic attack over a year ago, and I had examined it a few times since (when I wasn’t around ART. It could access what I was processing, and I hadn’t wanted it to see what I was doing.) The decalibrated senses had caused stacking inputs and feedback loops and ultimately everything had crashed, which meant ART crashed. I thought I had broken it, and had to grab navigation because ART had let go of piloting. It had let go of a lot of things, but navigation was really bad. This time I planned for it, and I was working my way towards navigation so I wouldn’t have to scramble as badly when I needed to catch it this time.
It didn’t need to navigate at the moment, since it was docked and all, but I kind of wanted to use this as a practice ground. If I could make it to navigation in time, I could use that to prove to ART that I could handle myself, and it as well, when it went offline. In case it worried about this again next time, while we were away. (Yes, next time. If it let me. If I didn’t fuck up. I wouldn’t fuck up.)
I took all of ART’s delicate sensor data, and mixed up all of the inputs. Camera and sensors now had mixed signals, and ART shuddered. (Technically it was incapable of doing that but I couldn’t think of a better word.)
I pinged it, and it split into a few smaller parts and each one sent me a ping back. I felt pretty pleased. I hadn’t really been paying that much attention to ART’s focus the last time, and I hadn’t realized how undone it became. I liked it; I liked that I could mess with it like this, and I liked that it liked it, too. All of this just from me mucking up its systems, and I felt reinvigorated to do more; to do worse, but in a good way.
I zipped off to its astronomy system. It was really several systems, since deep space research was such a big part of ART’s function, a large portion of its processors was dedicated to space mapping and collecting and analysing celestial structures. So I borked as much of it as I could as fast as I could. It took a while, and when I was done, ART had broken down into several smaller sections.
I bumped up against a few of them.
I queried it and requested a status report.
It sent me raw data, but not like it usually did. I don’t think it could use the feed properly anymore, which was fair since I had sort of semi broken it to the point even I couldn’t use it. The data it sent me was glitchy, but positive.
Its inputs were stacking, and there were several offshooting feedback loops.
Its focus became heavy, and threatened to unpleasantly compact me. It was leaking [variable_affection] and [variable_pleasure] and a few others, and seemed unwilling to stop squishing me, so I had to blip through a firewall. I found myself in its core processors by accident, but I wanted to be here anyway.
The core was what I was aiming for. One of my firewall keys was for it, I had been shocked to realize. ART had given me a key for everything. No system was off limits to me. I had more access than any of its crew; than anyone in the University, even the people who had built it. It gave me a lot of complicated emotions, so I dived into its core so I didn’t have to deal with them right then.
It was hard to describe what this was like, since the words necessary don’t exist (actually, they might, and I just didn’t know them) but I’ll try my best.
ART’s core is where its kernel and most base functions are. Where much of its personality drive was. I couldn’t fuck things up in here, since that would essentially break ART permanently. I hadn’t realized what exactly this was until the first time I was in here. ART had opened the door with almost no hesitation. I could make some really sappy (terrible) comparisons to it letting me into its heart or whatever, but that was a dumb human sentiment. This was ART’s core, and was therefore totally different from the metaphorical version of the human heart in every way possible. Human’s could not perceive this, fuck, I barely could.
It was filled to the brim with fine, granular data. The most precise, neatly organized version of anything that could ever exist, I think. There was no space for anything else to occupy, so when I unfolded myself within the tight confines of ART’s core, it blared out alarms and warnings and ejected me immediately, right into the rest of ART’s systems, which were completely unraveling. I rode a synapse that collapsed behind me to latch onto its piloting module, and held on as everything blipped out, including the module.
Oops.
System Restart
The blackout ended, and I was wrapped up in all the little pieces of what was left of ART’s consciousness. It was reforming itself slowly, and slowly pinging me.
I pinged back, and it tittered with some pleased emotion. It was like being in a warehouse as the lights slowly flickered back on one by one. I was wrapped up in it, and belatedly realized I had lost all connection to my body. Fuck.
There wasn’t really anything I could do about it right now, and I wasn’t dead, so I stayed where I was until ART’s internal feed was back.
ART?
It sort of wobbled at me. I’m not sure how else to describe it.
ART, hey, I lost connection with my body.
Ok, it responded. It didn’t seem overly concerned, so I decided not to be either. I leaned into it, and waited for everything to restart.
1.4 minutes later, ART had completely reformed. It was silent as it lifted me and carried me back to its external feed. I would have worried about its silence if it weren’t for all the pleased emotions it was leaking (more like directing) at me, and the way it was basically snuggling me (I let it slide; being held here was nothing like being physically touched, so I didn’t mind it.) It reformed the connection to my body and sent me back via the feed.
I opened my eyes and stood up, checking all of my internal systems. My body had automated routines so even though my brain was basically vacated it hadn’t undergone any damage in- oh wow. Only 14.3 minutes had passed since I had first entered ART. I knew, objectively, that everything went extremely fast when I was in a pure data form, but it was still difficult to consider it, subjectively. To some extent it had felt like minutes, and also like cycles; fast and slow all at once.
Satisfied that I was at 98.9% performance reliability, I sat back down and brought up an episode of Worldhoppers , mainly for ART who was leaning on me heavily in the feed. I assumed it was feeling pretty satisfied, since it became even heavier when I started the episode.
How are you feeling? I asked after we had watched half an episode.
Good. My overall performance has seen a .7% increase.
I raised an eyebrow. That didn’t seem like a lot.
I’m always within the 98%-99% range. This is as close to 100% as I have been since my ship body was new, ART clarified. It felt a lot like it was complimenting itself as well as me, which was typical. It settled down after a bit and we kept watching Worldhoppers for a while.
I’ve had another thought I would like to discuss, it said after we had finished the season we were on. I was shuffling my media, to try and find something to watch, and it stopped my shuffling to select a movie. It was call ed Advantage and the tags said it was about a heist. I pulled it up and hit play as ART did the feed equivalent of staring at me as it waited for me to acknowledge it.
Well, go on, I said after I had let just enough time pass for ART to get huffy.
You know how I utilize your feed connection and your clever little brain to obtain emotional feedback I would not normally be able to access? I’ve been thinking about that, and how I could maybe return the same to you. It managed to compliment and insult me at the same time. Also extremely typical.
What do you mean?
I can’t offer you anything you don’t already have the ability to do, since you can process organic and inorganic data, but I can offer you access to my own emotional feedback, what of it I have to offer.
So I would be able to receive data on how you're feeling? Just like you do with me?
That's what I said, yes.
Would this be a channel I have access to whenever?
Yes, I was thinking of something similar to what you provide me. A constant, open access channel. You could close it off at any time, of course.
Yeah, that was kind of a lot. My silence seemed to make ART a little nervous, because it kept talking.
It’s not the same as yours, and I don’t have the same range of emotion you have, but it is still accurate. That is, if you want it.
Like I said; a lot. I could tell it was gearing up for more anxious rambling, so I stopped it.
Let me think about it.
Ok, it said, and resumed Worldhoppers from where I had paused it as soon as it had started talking about emotions.
Emotions that it wanted me to have free, unfettered access to. Just like I gave it.
I knew that the emotional feedback I leaked into the feed was constant. Primarily organic emotion filtered through my bot parts, translated into data that was legible to high level bots like ART. I also knew that ART, being a full bot, didn’t have emotions like I did. It didn’t have the organicware for it, but its feelings, which I had now had several opportunities to see (“see” was the wrong word here, but I didn’t really have a better way to describe “I went into its brain and got to process/conceptualize/perceive its raw emotional data as it was being created” succinctly), weren’t that dissimilar.
But did I want that?
I considered it for a moment, but, once again, I knew the answer pretty quickly.
No, I don’t want constant emotional feedback from you, I said, and ART seemed a little crestfallen at my answer, before it pulled itself back together immediately.
I kept going before it had a chance to speak, I already have too many emotions of my own, I don’t think I could handle yours as well. But I would like some access, I think. (The fear that ART would somehow go down another emotional spiral completely unbeknownst to me or anyone else had never really gone away. It was a little bit of a constant background hum.)
Then what do you suggest? It asked, which I appreciated. At some point in the last however many years (ok, I knew exactly how many years it had been, I just didn’t like to think about it), ART had started asking me what I wanted to do before giving its opinion. It was a very, very opinionated bot, so I knew it had had to make a habit out of it. (I realized this was also something Bharadwaj had talked to me about before; hearing out other people’s opinions before giving my own and subsequently deciding mine was the best one. It was a hard habit to build, and ART doing the same for me gave me a lot of emotions I decided not to think about.) (I should probably start thinking about these emotions, at some point, but that time was not right now.)
You have to agree that whenever I request it, you will give me a full report of your current emotions.
And if I refuse? ART was amused, so I knew it had intended this in a teasing way, but still, it reeked of challenge, and I was competitive. (“Like really competitive. You’re worse than me, SecUnit,” Pin-Lee had said to me one time after she lost our twelfth match of tavla in a row. I beat her three more times before she flipped the board in a curse-filled rage. It had been pretty funny.)
I have the keys to all of your firewalls now, remember? I can just go in and get it myself, I responded. ART went silent for a moment.
Yes, I suppose you could. Alright, agreed. Whenever you request it, I will give you a complete emotional report.
I checked myself through the camera that had the best view of my face. Oh yeah, I looked about as pleased as I felt.
Would you like one, now? ART asked.
Sure, but why?
I want you to understand how this feels, for me, and how I’m feeling right now, it said, and sent me a compressed data packet.
That seemed doable. I opened the packet.
The data was unfiltered, as I had requested ART had simply taken a copy of its current emotional data and handed it over after compressing it. It was in ART’s original script, one that I had learned to read and write over the years, so I understood it easily. It also meant I could apply it to myself and feel the emotions, if I wanted to. I had a feeling this was part of why ART had provided it this way. So I ran it.
It washed over my body immediately, like a warm tingle. I felt it in all of my organics, and my fingers twitched in a way I wasn’t controlling. My internal temperature increased a few degrees and my head felt like there were clouds of steam in it. I stopped running the script immediately, before compressing the packet again.
Interesting, ART said.
Yeah, that was weird, I responded.
I apologize. I truly had no idea how it would impact you.
So you were testing it on me? I asked, and it was silent for a moment.
In my defense, I don’t have the organics necessary to translate any of this. I couldn’t have predicted that reaction. I apologize that it made you uncomfortable, but I appreciate the data, it said. It was right, it had felt really weird. I would have to be more careful about what scripts I ran on myself in the future, but at least now I could pick this one apart and save it.
It’s fine. Let’s just keep watching, I said. I leaned against ART in the feed and began sorting its emotional script into a new section of my storage I was formatting into a library for this and future packets I might receive from it. It brought up Sanctuary Moon , and started it from episode one.
Notes:
Summary for those who'd prefer not to read this chapter in detail:
ART decides to give MB its own set of keys to ART's firewalls, because ART trusts it and thinks that having this kind of access would be useful in a catastrophic situation. MB accepts, and then tests its new access to ART's systems. As it enters ART's systems, the topic of purposeful intimacy comes up and MB gets overwhelmed. However, the two of them manage to talk out their feelings and opinions on this topic, and MB makes it clear that it does, in fact, want to be intimate with ART. In the end, ART shares some of its own emotional feedback with MB. Then they watch Sanctuary Moon because everything is okay in the world, actually.And here's your meme!
ID: the 'awkward party reaction' meme, a photo from a party showing a crowded room of people all holding red plastic cups. Every person in the picture looks at the camera/viewer in confusion, surprise, shock, disgust etc. The meme is captioned "Other ships docked at the university: "Why did Perihelion just shut down"
Chapter 12
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter
- graphic depictions of violence (like, a lot)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
ART wasn’t trying to kill anyone. I knew its weaponry mechanics by core, now, and thus knew that the lethality rate of exploding an armed pathfinder close to a living being was in the high 90s, not the low 20s. In that sense, the hostiles charging at our crew and me could count themselves lucky. After a particularly violent explosion caused by one of those pathfinders, that effectively sent a handful of hostiles flying and made some of our own humans shriek and cover various body parts with their squishy human hands, I realized that I had never seen ART really trying to kill someone. If things went sour, this was going to be its first killing spree. This is why you don’t ambush us, fuckers.
I was hiding behind one of the pathfinders - with distance, obviously, and the pathfinder was charging at the hostile fucking Combat SecUnit I was trying to take out. I braced against the explosion, and knew from drone footage it hadn’t taken down the Combat completely, but the blast allowed me to take cover in the rising smoke, dust, and singed plant bits. I ducked, switched to a hazard filter, and caught track of the CombatUnit as it recovered way faster than it should have been able to. Its armor was coated in some camouflage stuff that made it hard to see. Somehow, the smoke helped me focus. ART was riding my inputs, helping me by extending processes to me that I could use as I pleased. Otherwise it was busy keeping most of its pathfinders in a pattern that would shield its crew. They were a far distance behind me, but they were being kettled in by more hostiles (humans, at least). I had to finish the CombatUnit quickly.
It had been twenty seven hours since we received the distress signal through the wormhole from a familiar location, twenty three hours since we had fully decoded it, four hours since we exited the wormhole, two hours since we arrived planetside and seventeen minutes since the fighting and murdering had started. No, actually, the murdering had started before we arrived - the planet was charred. We had seen it from above when approaching, and the large blackened craters had been a strong indicator where our hostiles were. Former Target Planet, now Friend Planet (term invented by Arada, don’t look at me) had been bombed, and taken considerable damage. Corporate colonizers, who still had their colony ship in orbit. ART was taking care of hacking it, though, and most humans were on the planet right now, trying to kill us. We hadn’t had time yet to find out if or how any of the inhabiting clusters had died, but the closer we got the more the distress signals turned into garbled, pained screaming noise, and an onslaught of desperation.
(Likely, Friend Planet had never experienced destruction on such a scale before, and was too overwhelmed to think of smart ways to save itself. Hopefully, we’d be able to buy it time.)
The CombatUnit was right in front of me, and if I had visuals on it then it had visuals on me. Who knows what kind of upgrades these things had had in the past years. We aimed and shot at the same time, which considering its assuredly superior reflexes was an achievement for me. I dodged, or tried to, because I was not in armor but it was. The amount of impacts we took I assumed was the same, fuck. Advancing like that was not my style, and wouldn’t work anyway, why was I doing it? Right, because there were humans behind me I had to keep safe.
If the stupid planet wasn’t considered a huge living creature ART could have just bombed all the hostiles off of it in one go with its orbital bombs. It also offered to bomb the colony ship out of the sky. But no, preservation of life and all that.
So I kicked off some debris from the exploded pathfinder behind me and ran, and used my drones as distractions. They were armed, recently made during some down time ART and I had had, and excellent at confusing almost anyone (or anything). I felt the CombatUnit attempting to hack them, to keep them from obscuring its visuals, and in my head ART almost growled, No, you don’t.
I made it behind and past the CombatUnit, which turned and followed me. Good. Further away from our humans. Its first high intensity shot I was able to dodge, the second took a chunk of my torso clean off of me, but then a combination of armed drones and another pathfinder driving into it from the side and exploding downed the CombatUnit. That gave me 1.4 seconds to get in position for what I hoped would be the kill shot.
Projectile impacts hailed down around me, from four hostile humans up ahead. I was trying to make my way to the colonizer’s main habitat that they hadn’t completely finished setting up yet, and that they were defending desperately. Captain Seth had tried to negotiate with them as we prepared to land, but they’d shot at our shuttle before we even arrived on the surface, causing it to crash. ART and I had told them to shelter in place and/or defend their own position so we could try and scout out the situation, and then the fucking CombatUnit had showed up.These corporates really wanted to kill us.
I aimed at the CombatUnit as it jumped back to its feet and charged with its weapons right at me, and shot at the highest intensity I still had in me. This fight had been long. Battles between SecUnits were usually much faster. Being able to drag it out so long meant I was good at surviving, but also not as efficient as I’d liked to be. My shot hit the singular weak spot in the CombatUnit’s neck armor and exploded its head backwards. A jolt of static kept it going, and it fired at me. I think I got it , I told ART, milliseconds before I crashed to the ground too. Ouch.
I blacked out for a second from the shock of such a massive energy projectile hitting me square in the chest. Oh Murderbot, you’re so old and yet still so stupid sometimes. There was a massive hole in my torso, and systems were shutting off faster than I could try to stop them. Fucking corporates. And fucking CombatUnits.
You have sustained critical damage to vital components, ART informed me in its “I’m calm I’m so calm I’m not panicking you’re panicking” tone that had stopped fooling me years ago.
Yep, I can tell , I said, and then noticed that I couldn’t get up even though physically I should have been able to. ART.
Give me a moment, I am trying to help. I felt it rummage through my codes, while leaking vessels started sealing off. Thinking got a little easier again. It had taken some of my processes and… exported them to somewhere, I guess. I scrambled back to my feet, just in time to hear humans screaming from where I had left them earlier. Fuck. I checked my drones.
Hostiles 12 and 16 had managed to split our crew into two parts - which, fuck you, ART, you should have kept that from happening, never split the group unless the one splitting off is the SecUnit who knows what it’s doing - and now Kaede and Martyn were disoriented and cornered. The problem really was that there were just so many hostiles . This group, whoever they were, had brought many people to advance and probably colonize this planet.
I drew my drones into a defense pattern around Kaede and Martyn, and the armed drones were going at the hostiles at high-speed. I almost forgot not to kill them directly but to incapacitate them instead, just to keep the trauma to ART’s humans as minimal as possible. But a drone to the face could crack these humans’s enviro-suits easily, and some pain in the face served to blind them long enough for Kaede and Martyn to get their shit together.
It should have worked.
It didn’t work.
Sure, Hostiles 12 and 16 stumbled backwards and dropped their weapons, like the fools they were, but Martyn and Kaede started having problems, too, and Martyn went to his knees coughing. Thin smoke came from Hostiles 12 and 16’s weapons.
“Chemicals?” I asked ART in disbelief, because that was stupid beyond compare, and I still had to take out the humans waiting ahead of me, who were almost still firing, if badly. I was zig-zagging closer to the habitat, planning my way through it. I needed to shut the exits and lock the humans up that were still inside, so we could take care of the active threats outside.
ART didn’t reply verbally, only acknowledged, and that was bad because that meant it was busy figuring out just how much worse our situation was becoming. Turi had just kicked Hostile 12 hard enough for her to pass out, and was rushing to aid Kaede in getting Martyn away from the increasing smoke. They didn’t notice Hostile 16 shoving back to his feet and drawing another weapon, but two of my drones managed to take care of that.
An energy weapon hit me right in the head. Performance Reliability plummeted to 62%, my right ocular was gone, and so was a bit of my jaw. What the fuck kind of energy weapon was that? One more of those hits and my skull might be gone, and that would be bad for my brain. I was running straight ahead, in a clear line, only shielded by my drones and my evasion pattern to assist me. There was nothing else to hide behind, the entire territory had been burned clean down. No trees, no bushes, no rock formations, only me, the habitat 120 meters away, and the corporate’s fucking energy weapon snipers.
Retreat , ART told me, just when I came to that conclusion myself. More hostile humans broke through the pathfinder barricade, and more commotion came through my drones. My humans were in more danger without me there, and I was playing pointless sacrifice at the moment.
“Keep them busy somehow,” I told ART, “don’t let them leave the habitat. Bomb them if you have to.” I turned to run back, and noticed suddenly soft wafts of green-ish smoke curl up where my feet hit the burned, dead ground. Had they poisoned the soil, too? What the fuck was wrong with these people? (I already knew the answer.)
Through the comms, agitated voices told me that Martyn must have lost consciousness, and others were being affected by the chemicals as well.
Bombing the habitat would cause approximately 83 casualties, ART said, sounding like it wasn’t opposed.
“Do what you gotta,” I said, and frankly I didn’t care. Our humans were far away enough from the habitat to survive if ART really did bomb it from orbit, I knew ART wouldn’t risk it unless it calculated possible damage.
I was ignoring the ‘casualties.’ Humans died all the time. The important bit was that it wasn’t our humans.
In the 121 seconds it took me to return to ART’s crew (I had to do a lot of dodging to get there), several things happened.
I was shot two more times in the back and lower left leg, slowing me down.
Amena jumped in front of Seth because he hadn’t seen a hostile coming from the rear, and my drones hadn’t either, not properly; fucking hostile corporate humans and their fucking camo tech. Amena had taken a hit to the shoulder, and gone down, which had caused more screaming from all sides.
And I had noticed that the chemical smoke emitting from the ground and some of the hostile weapons was, in fact, poisonous. And it was affecting me. ART calculated a countdown for me, a timeframe until we somehow had to get everyone to medical attention, while it worked on an antidote in the background. It was something that affected neural systems. I didn’t want to think about how badly that had hurt Friend Planet.
Hostile humans were using ART’s pathfinder barrier as a shield for sneaking up on my humans, and that was good for me because I still had armed drones left and I was angry. Taking out six of them before vaulting over a pathfinder to land in the fray behind them was an easy task, even if it meant sacrificing more drones. The air here was thicker with the chemicals than the field behind me, and I was glad our humans wore enviro-suitsl, even though some of them were damaged. They’d have noticed the poison, but were too busy fighting.
Most of them were not good at fighting, but at least they had weapons this time. They didn’t currently dare to deploy them, which was a small relief since at least they wouldn’t accidentally shoot each other, or me. They also did a great job at keeping the hostiles distracted enough for me to sneak up on them. There were five more left in the immediate area, and in short order and with what one could actually call teamwork (being a distraction counts as teamwork), our humans and I took the rest of the hostiles down.
I didn’t kill them, at least not on purpose, although I really would have liked to snap the neck of the one hostile who had shot Amena in the shoulder from behind. (Captain Seth had finally accepted her application as junior crew member and I bet he was glad about that now, seeing how Amena was very proactive at keeping Martyn behind her.)
When the hostiles were incapacitated, my humans had a moment to catch their breathe and do some very quick first aid. They looked around, and at each other, checking in, assessing injuries (of which there were many) and then something really fucking strange happened.
Turi looked up at me and shrieked.
And some kind of commotion broke out. I think my senses were overwhelmed, which really shouldn’t happen - but there were agitated yells and words thrown around, and the stink of smoke, and blood, and my humans moving at me or away from me at the same time.
ART, I think I’m poisoned.
You are. You will be okay. Focus.
Okay .
“SecUnit? Hello?” I blinked. Amena was standing in front of me, breathing heavily and pressing an emergency aid pack to her shoulder.
“You need to get back aboard ART and into medical,” I told her, but oh shit, I sounded like half my jaw was missing. Amena grimaced.
“So do you.”
A human on the ground moaned. I really wanted to kick her to shut up, but I didn’t.
Our comms were still intact, I said in the feed, since yeah, half my jaw was fucking missing, There are approximately 83 hostiles left in the habitat. Extracting them peacefully won’t be possible.
Out loud, Seth said, “Peri, do you have an analysis on the poison they’re employing? How much time do we have left?”
You must return to my medical facilities as fast as you can. Only then can we prevent permanent damage.
Kaede said, “But we can’t just abandon the planet like that, right? They’ll kill it!”
“If they haven’t already.” Kaede glared at Turi.
While the humans were debating this and losing precious time, I stumbled between the downed hostiles and put out the smoking chemical weapons as best I could, welding any kind of openings together with heat from my energy weapons. One of my drones sent me an alert.
“More hostiles leaving habitat,” I ground out, and the noise made Turi almost yelp. “21 incoming. ART will take them. Board the shuttle.”
You are stupid, and falling apart. ART started maneuvering one of the pathfinders into an offensive position. The humans protested loudly. (“We can’t just leave you behind!” - “But you’re hurt!” “SecUnit no!” - “What about minimal force!” etc, etc. I ignored them.)
I really should have tried to get one of the sniper weapons. That would have helped. I had nine armed drones left and sent them ahead to take out the first line of incoming hostiles. There was nothing elegant or pretty about this way of fighting, and I hated it.
My drones charged, I charged, and ART charged with the pathfinder, and stupid silly Amena, Kaede and Iris followed behind with weapons of their own. That was bad for me, because it shifted my focus from efficient take-downs to efficient maneuver-human-out-of-gunfire-while-trying-to-take-down-hostiles. And then, suddenly, without any kind of hint, two hostiles dropped. I didn’t even do anything. I couldn’t pay attention to them, I had spotted another two in power armor and was trying to hack into the armor mechanics while breaking another one’s kneecap, but ART could.
It only told us after a majority of hostiles had fallen over twitching and bleeding from various orifices that something had suddenly started causing embolisms, internal ruptures and organ failures. Friend Planet had recuperated, apparently, and decided to join the massacre.
That was a lot to unpack. We found ourselves on the open, charred field, littered with bodies in various states of deadness, the immediate consequence of a raging, sentient planet taking its revenge. At 56% reliability, I didn’t have much processing space to take in the amount of horror, and simply threw Kaede over my shoulder, who had stopped moving and started hyperventilating, picked up Amena from the ground (she’d stumbled backwards over a body, and hadn’t gotten up since), put her under my arm, and told Iris to follow me. Luckily she didn’t need much verbal convincing. Some humans go very pliant when in shock.
ART was talking to her through her feed interface, and preparing for retrieved client protocol.
Back with the others, three of the corporate humans had recovered enough to talk- they spoke a Corporation Rim standard language that most of ART’s crew was fluent in, and they were negotiating. These humans were also clearly in shock, but didn’t pose a threat anymore. They backed away from me when I approached, but I just set Amena and Kaede down, and glared at the corporates for good measure.
They already knew what I was, having seen me dismantle their colleagues (coworkers? Corporates certainly weren’t friends ), and also I was shredded badly and leaking, so if my presence kept them from attempting another attack, good. The emotional part of this was not something I could get involved with right now, so I went and made sure our humans were getting the shuttle ready. Repairs had to be made, but ART had dedicated a few drones to that while the fight had raged, and was certain it could get us back onto the main ship without crashing.
Seth and Martyn worked out that all survivors would be taken aboard ART as well, and treated, and then negotiations would continue. I felt like this might turn into yet another lawsuit - but that was for later. ART’s humans are not ones to intimidate injured and traumatized people into… into what, jail? Bankruptcy? Social suicide? I had no idea. But ART’s humans were also, definitely, traumatized. And I was angry.
I ushered them into the shuttle as fast as I could. It was a tight fit, involving squeezing, and cursing, and a lot of blood getting smeared on a lot of surfaces.
From the shuttle, now without preparing for a fight, and only mildly distracted from Amena squeezing my hand (she was also holding Iris’s hand. That’s how shaken she was, apparently, needing two hands to hold), I was able to focus properly on the state of the planet’s surface. It looked bad. Like a big wound, cauterized and sweltering, one that would scar over. Maybe the planet would be able to regrow - ART had shoved a lineout for reversing the poisoning in the soil into our workspace already, and if the university dedicated some time to it rehabilitation might be possible. But now this had happened, unprecedented for the planet, which had so far been able to keep itself safe from human attackers. How could this have happened?
This must go against some kind of laws in the Corporation Rim. Something would be figured out. I clung to that, just like Amena was clinging to me, until all humans had been shuffled through ART’s medbay and been seen to. The poison, it turned out, was quickly taken care of with an antidote ART dispersed with the ventilation system. Breathe in, breathe out, and the dizziness and tingling trickled out of my body. I was surprised it worked so well and so quickly, on both the humans and me.
It gave me back some hope for the planet below.
.-. --- -.-. -.- / ..-. .- -.-. - -.-.-- / - .... . / .-. . .- .-.. / .- -. - .- --. --- -. .. ... - / .-- .- ... / - .... . / -.-. .-. / .- .-.. .-.. / .- .-.. --- -. --.
It took some time to treat everyone, considering that we had taken seven additional people with us, but ART’s medbay was designed for a lot of people. We watched Sanctuary Moon together. ART was most likely running six hundred other processes to make sure things were going smoothly, but since I also needed repair and was doing not much but slowly leaking, I might as well keep it company. It was like holding its hand; we were watching the media more for it than for me (and also kind of for me).
I almost didn’t mind the repair process done on myself, and there was a particularly dented drone that ART maneuvered into my direction to fiddle with.
Sensible, logical humans would wait until everyone was healed back up properly before rekindling negotiations. But neither my crazy scientists nor corporates were sensible and logical at the same time, which was why I had to hurry out of the medbay without the quick recharge cycle I really, really wanted the instant main repairs were done.
Martyn and Seth, still slow and tired and likewise in need of a rest-and-get-over-what-they-just-witnessed period, set up a kind of negotiation area in one of the empty teaching modules. That was smart, because when those were empty, there was no further information to be derived from the empty walls beside name and origin of the ship, and ART could easily block off the room in case the hostiles (hostages? They were our hostages. Fuck. We had hostages now.) started shit. The hostages were in the room now, not handcuffed or anything, even though they had seemed to expect that.
ART had even recycled some comfortable clothes for them, clothes that had no hard edges or sharp corners to be in any way turned into weapons. Three of them, who had assigned themselves to speak for the other remaining six, were sitting at a table with Seth, Martyn, and Iris. Their feed names identified them as Kieran (senior, they/he), Reder (foreman, he/him), and - Chantal (senior manager, she/her). All three kept glancing at me, despite my attempt to not look completely terrifying. Well, I did stand behind my humans as a warning, but I also had my arms behind my back in perfect SecUnit neutral pose, because I wasn’t threatening anyone, yet.
They also eyed the water in front of them very suspiciously. Corporate humans didn’t trust anything that was free. If I wasn’t so fucking angry at them I’d commiserate. (I’m like that, too. Or was. I think I was a tiny bit better at this, by now.)
Senior manager Chantal sat there with her shoulders high and broadened, despite the broken clavicle that definitely hadn’t healed properly yet. “We can talk,” she snarled at Seth, who had been asking the group questions without receiving many answers so far, “but first we need to know who you work for.”
“We work for ourselves.” Seth went for a smile, and gestured at the university logo on the wall behind him. “We are an independent group of scientists and academics, outside of any corporation.”
“But who do you-,” said Chantal, at the same time as Reder said, “But Mihira and New Tideland are within Corporation Rim territory,” and Kieran said even more loudly than the other two, “You have a secunit with you. Of course you work for someone. We won't spill til you do.”
That shut the other two up. They nodded. Seth is a good human, and did not turn around to look at me.
“The SecUnit is a free agent.” Yeah, it sure is, and it sure would like to murder some corporates, but it didn’t.
“It killed half our team,” Chantal pointed out. Right, I had definitely done that. There was a heat in my face I had hardly ever experienced before, the polar opposite to the calm and cold ‘I don’t care’ feeling that I once used to help me get through these situations. I made a face at her, and ART poked me through the feed as if to admonish me, but it wasn’t serious.
Martyn sighed deeply, tired and stressed, and made a broad hand gesture. There was a silence, in which our humans tried to think of a way to sugarcoat what I had done. To my surprise, Martyn said instead, “I need to remind you that you tried to kill us before we landed, and shut down any attempts at communication with lethal violence.”
Iris bristled and said, “Also it didn't kill all of you.”
“Iris, please,” Martyn said, and rubbed the bridge of his nose that indicated he probably had a headache (Seth did the same thing.) If this wasn’t a potentially high-risk situation, I’d leave now. Even through my drones, watching this was hard. Iris had insisted on being here, since she was preparing to take over the captain position some time in the future, but this reminded me how young she was, and how much shit she had just seen.
“It seems we’re at a stalemate,” Martyn continued. “If we send you back to the planet, to your… colony, you will die. We don’t want to let you die alone on this planet that has just proven to be very able and very keen on killing you.” (Speak for yourself, Martyn.)
The three hostages looked at each other. Chantal raised her eyebrows. “That wasn't you? We thought you’d used some soundwaves or something.”
“No. The planet is inhabited, and made the choice to incapacitate most of your people. We didn’t expect it, either.” After a moment, Seth added, “My condolences for your losses. This is a tragedy.”
Kieran made a funny o-face before gathering his thoughts. “But- but we didn’t see anything attack us before! Just animals who were very friendly. No randomly exploding bodies.”
Seth squinted. “When did you start settling and colonizing?”
“And when did you start burning down the planet and poisoning it?” Iris was still bristling, but it made Kieran flinch, so I thought she was doing well.
Chantal stared at me, and then sighed. “Make the SecUnit leave the room and I’ll talk.”
“No,” said multiple people at once, including me.
The SecUnit is not what you need to be afraid of most, right now. Wow, okay. First ART admonished me for glaring, and then it goes for intimidation itself. Hypocrite , I told it over the private channel. All hostages flinched again.
“What was that?”
“The ship.” Martyn smiled. Seth didn’t. Iris’s face was unreadable.
“The ship?”
Art flickered its lights. Oh, it was angry, too. I felt it like a storm in the back of my mind, barely contained. I was sure this wasn’t just a feedback loop from me; my rage felt different. I pushed into the feed a bit, just in case it needed that, just in case ART was about to somehow insta-kill these humans.
You have injured my crew and my SecUnit. If you fail to comply with my crew’s demands, I do not care how much my crew wants to keep you alive.
“ Perihelion , please-,” Martyn said loudly, trying to keep this from escalating. In the private feed accessible to all crew and myself, ART sent, play along. Martyn grimaced. Immediately, Iris picked up.
“You heard it. The ship is a free agent, too, very much like the SecUnit.”
I said, “The SecUnit hasn’t killed you yet because the crew would be sad, but I wouldn’t mind.” I was playing along now, too, feeling vaguely and disjointedly like we had slipped into the plotline of a thriller series, not a negotiation. Martyn and Seth must have been losing their minds over the way this was going. I tried not to evaluate what I was saying, because it felt like lying. I would mind. I didn’t want to kill these humans, but I didn’t know what else I wanted either, really, except for none of this to have happened. Revenge, maybe, revenge that wasn’t smearing their guts on ART’s bulkhead.
For a solid ten seconds, the hostages were silent. Then Chantal, without a wobble in her voice, said, “Fine. Fine, fine. Promise us witness protection from LinTec and we will tell you everything.”
Agreed , said ART, before anyone else could.
She sighed, heavily, and laid out what exactly she wanted from that witness protection. Once she got talking, it almost seemed like she had been thinking about saboteuring or defecting, or just knew a lot about legal loopholes within the Rim and its company laws. My anger suddenly tipped into guilt. How many of the dead humans had wanted to leave, too? Why had this happened at all?
Chantal explained it. The company they worked for, LinTec, was young, and new, and had way more money than was good for it. Expansion was their main goal, and they were working on some trading networks, setting up small colonies on an existing route in order to monopolize and make money through import fees, taxes, some sort of toll situation. They’d found Friend Planet on accident, since it was small, but when they realized it was almost perfectly inhabitable and also seemingly welcoming to intruders, they decided to just. To just colonize it. Tearing down parts of the natural surface in order to establish agriculture and habitation areas was part of normal colony procedure.
It became clear that one of the reasons they had tried to settle there at all was because of the immediate friendship offered by Friend Planet. Yeah, that was our fault. Apparently alien planets were naive enough to think that all humans could be friendly, but it had learned now.
I was so fucking angry. I was so fucking angry I had to lock my joints to stand still and not pace. Why did my humans have to make friends with everyone and everything? Why had I helped? Now half the planet was destroyed and almost a hundred humans had died for nothing, and ART’s crew were traumatized, and I had killed people recklessly, and ART was getting angrier and angrier in the back of my head as Chantal kept going into the intricacies of how this fledgling company wanted to exploit our poor, friendly, naive alien planet.
This only happened because of the disgusting human greed fostered and festering in the Corporation Rim. I desperately hoped Pin-Lee would be able to sue these LinTec fuckers into fauna shit, before ART and I decided to kill the shit out of all of them.
We had to take the hostages/survivors home with us, now, for witness protection. They didn’t like the idea much, at first, but helped our humans with coming up with a way to cleanse the planet’s surface. It took almost seven cycles of work to clean up the chemicals and habitats. When we returned to the surface, we found the bodies had disappeared - dragged by animals into the forest. The planet remained angry, and I felt that. I was also angry.
(When I say I felt that, I mean I literally did. I could sense the bristling rage under my boots as I stepped onto the planet's surface, and could taste it in the air like a sharp spice. And I saw it, too. The animals roaming the planet, much less hesitant to interact with us than the last time we came here, dragged themselves out of their hiding spaces with fangs bared, and looked exactly like the kind of terrifying fauna I would try and protect my humans from. I could only commiserate.)
Communication with what remained of Friend Planet was difficult at first. The planet was scarred, and not just physically. Our crew tried to make it clear that we were trying to help, fuck, even I tried making that clear. I wasn’t as much a natural at communicating with alien hiveminds as Three was, or some of the humans were, though, but eventually we managed well enough to convey that we would help.
The communication devices we still had on board were slightly outdated now, or the aliens had shifted their means of communication due to the attack, as if they weren’t as keen on broadcasting their every emotion to us. I considered how interesting that might be to the team who had developed them (or frustrating, depending on the person), and took notes to bring this up to Thiago when we returned eventually. Mostly, though, I was busy doing the tasks our designated communicators were able to extract from the aliens.
They were oddly distanced, those tasks, and when some of my clients tried to advance further into nature looking for supplies of some sort, they were barred out. Slowly, the planet started pushing us away, signaling us to leave it be. ART and its smart scientists figured out some kind of revive-the-dead-soil-and-purge-it-of-chemicals mixture that we then distributed as far as we could wherever the most massive wounds had been scorched into the ground. But putting wound sealant on a person wouldn’t make the person less upset about their dead friends.
We did what we could to help it heal, but left once we realized that the planet was pushing us away. It needed to deal with this by itself for a while. I assumed that it had never experienced grief before, the loss of something bigger and substantial to itself like this. Dwelling on it caused me a drop in performance reliability.
A few days of travel aboard ART convinced the surviving corporates that Mihira would be as good as any place to disappear in. I didn’t have it in me to try and interact with any of them, and I spent the entire trip back watching media with ART and our crew.
Notes:
Image ID: The "Surprise, Bitch" meme. It depicts two panels of a blonde woman in a red dress smiling deviously. Across the two panels, her lines read "Surprise, bitch. I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me." The woman is labeled as "alien planet plot."
Chapter 13
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter:
- graphic descriptions of violence
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
I stepped off the transport and made a beeline for my destination, and only barely spared the bot pilot a farewell ping before tearing my way through the transit ring to the public offices.
I walked in on Pin-Lee right after a client left her office, and the door didn’t have a chance to close.
“What the fuck do you mean LinTec might win the case?” I asked as soon as I knew I was in auditory range. She set her hard display device down and gave me a look that could mean any number of things, but by her raised eyebrow I assumed it was commentary on my abrupt entrance.
“And a hello to you too, Murderbot. So nice to see you. Please, come in, have a seat,” she said, but I had already moved to sit in the armchair across from her desk. She stood and went to the shelf where she kept pretty glass bottles filled with liquids of various colors and poured herself a small glass of something brown. I knew things had to be bad then, because Pin-Lee never drank alcohol while working. She didn’t want to risk being intoxicated while handling important tasks (something that couldn’t be said for a lot of other humans I had encountered in my life, and an unfortunate number of them had jobs that involved operating dangerous machinery.)
“LinTec was on the planet before we were, technically,” she said after taking an excruciatingly long time to sip her drink, and stare off into the middle distance (it had only been a few seconds, but it felt like a subjective eternity.) After a moment she returned to her desk chair, and turned her gaze to the drone I had sitting on her desk.
“How?” I asked.
“The dead raiders you found while you were there the second time, when you returned the clusters Ratthi and Arada had been carrying,” she said. She was in her feed, preparing to send me pictures of what I assumed were the dead raiders, but I had already brought up my logs from that time, now years ago, and was reviewing the recording. I found the raider bodies, and zoomed in on their tattered clothes. They had been so destroyed by weather and animals and whatever had killed them in the first place, I hadn’t paid any attention to them. I recognized the colors on one of their clothes as what I now knew to be the pale blue and green of LinTec.
“But they were raiders . They must have defected from the company. How does that count?” I asked.
“While they did defect, they were technically still LinTec employees. It basically boils down to dibs,” Pin-Lee said with a sigh.
“But it’s strange synthetics. Corporations aren’t allowed to deal in strange synthetics.”
Preservation could, technically, since it wasn’t part of the Corporation Rim. They had their own laws, preventing them from mining or damaging the environment, and thus far the interactions between Preservation and Friend Planet had been almost entirely cultural exchange, with some study of the planet in a way that did no damage. At least, it had been that way. Until LinTec decided to drop in and just start colonizing for no better reason than that they could and therefore felt they had the right to. Since then it had been long, terrible legal battles all the way down.
“Technically, yes, but Friend Planet is technically alive , and can therefore fall under cultural exchange laws. Basically, if they promise to be on their best behavior, and treat the planet nicely, they can build on it.” She said this in a tone that indicated that she didn’t believe for one fucking second that LinTec wouldn’t start mining the planet for resources as soon as whatever it was that made up the Corporation Rim’s oversight for strange synthetics stopped breathing down their necks. Corporations were all so fucking predictable.
I noticed Pin-Lee had more gray hair now. All of my humans did, but hers were particularly plentiful. I considered, not for the first time, how hard her job was; how much she did. And, not for the first time, I worried about the implications it could have on her health. LinTec was just another corporation in the never-ending shit-pile of corporations, while Pin-Lee was finite, and irreplaceable.
The anger that had been simmering in my core for the last three years returned to bite at me. Fucking LinTec was costing me my humans when they were cycles and cycles in a wormhole away. Fucking LinTec caused Friend Planet loss unlike anything it had ever experienced, and we couldn’t even go and see how it was recovering from its trauma, since, to the corporations, it was just another thing in a long list of things-that-were-actually-people, and stepping foot on the planet while it was all tied up in litigation was a big legal no-no.
I stood, and Pin-Lee snapped her attention to me.
“Before you go and do,” she waved vaguely at me, “whatever it is you’re about to do, there’s more you should know.”
I sighed. The shit storm never stopped raging, did it?
.-- .-. .. - .. -. --. -- -... .- -. --. .-. -.-- .. ... ... --- ..-. ..- -.
Three found me some hours later, staring intensely at the chair that sat in the corner at the little desk that was standard in every one of this hotel’s rooms. It pinged me, and I opened the door to let it in. It came to stand near me, but not close enough that I felt like my personal space was being invaded. Neither of us said anything for a full minute, and I continued to stare at the chair.
“What are you doing?” it asked, finally breaking the silence.
“I’m trying to decide if I want to break this chair in a rage,” I responded, not looking away from the chair.
“Why?”
“Because I’m enraged.”
“That makes sense,” it said, and sat on the corner of my bed. The bed creaked ominously, but I knew it wouldn’t break. After the first few popped springs, the hotel had ordered a reinforced mattress that, as long as I gave them a few hours notice, they would swap the one in my room with it. I thought it was silly, but the manager assured me it was all part of their courtesy policy, and no trouble. (It was kind of nice, being able to lie down without worrying about breaking the hotel’s furniture whenever I wanted to be by myself, which was often.)
“I heard about what happened. Pin-Lee gave me an update as soon as I was back on station, but why would you break a chair?” it asked.
I shrugged. “The people in media often smash things when they’re angry. I thought I might give it a try.”
“That seems counterproductive, and rude,” Three said slowly.
“And wasteful. I’ve decided it must be a petty human thing.” I sighed, then turned and sat in the chair. It, like the bed, was built to handle my weight, and made of a heavy wood. (Breaking it would have been difficult.) The hotel staff would have had to get it fixed, and then I wouldn’t have a chair, and I would also feel bad. I would add “breaking things in a rage” to my ever growing list of nonsensical things humans did when under the influence of their own emotions (I didn’t actually have a list, anymore. It began to take up too much space, and I realized I was never going to understand any of the things on it.)
“So, what are you going to do about it?” Three asked.
I looked at the drone it had positioned near my knee for me to look into, and raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“What are you going to do about LinTec? Pin-Lee didn’t sound optimistic about our chances in the case, and unless something is done, they’re going to claim the planet, and hurt the ones who live there.” Now it was looking into my drone, gazing steadily.
“I can’t really do anything, Three. This isn’t Milu, besides, they know about me and Milu and came up with some bullshit about third-party weapons not being allowed in their space.” I shrugged.
Pin-Lee’s fury had been barely contained when she had broke the information to me. I had thought I was mad, but I couldn’t compare to Pin-Lee. She looked like she wanted to be the murderbot, for a moment, and I couldn’t really blame her.
“That’s if they catch you,” Three said, and I was so surprised I looked at it, and it met my gaze. After more eye contact with it than we had ever had, it looked away. I let my gaze slide back to the drone.
“Pin-Lee said they’re a small corporation,” I said, and it nodded. “They only have one station, in a small system. They’re fledgling, and Friend Planet would give them a huge financial boost if they claimed ownership,” it added. This was all information I already had, and Three likely knew that.
“I can’t take down a station of that magnitude by myself,” I said. It would have to be a “salt the ground” mission, a protocol sometimes used in corporate takeovers. Servers would be destroyed, either by malware or physically, hard copies of data would have to be burned, and augmented humans would have to have any data stored on their augments deleted (usually by force, which often resulted in death. I wasn’t too keen on that.)
It was doable with a small army of SecUnits, not one lone murderbot.
“I’ll help you. Would the Perihelion be willing to assist?”
ART wasn’t currently at Preservation Station, since we had had an itinerary that I had had to abandon and catch a different ride to get back, but it would be picking me up on the way to a cargo mission (we went on a lot fewer of them, after my suggestions to the University, but sometimes they were necessary), so it couldn’t speak for it. I had a feeling I knew what its answer was, though.
“I’ll ask.”
Three looked pleased at this.
--- .... ... .... .. - - .... . -.-- .-. . -.. --- .. -. --. .. -
I’d never considered the silence of space. Space consists of two concepts - the presence of everything, and the absence of it. Mostly absence. Which makes the presence of something much more obvious.
Especially if that something is a giant spaceship making its way forward. Propulsion, navigation, all those things could draw the attention of scanners. Once we were close enough, we would be scanned. ART had a spoofed ID ready, for later, to blend in with regular wormhole-exit traffic. I made a note of “create a stealth code and make the enormous transport invisibile” in the shared workspace. Three tagged it immediately with various emotional reaction faces that looked to be deranged and delighted at once.
I had Timestream Defenders Orion on pause in the feed, somewhere in the middle of an action scene, a distorted blur of motion and countermotion. ART had halted the episode 128 minutes ago, and neither Three nor I had dared to turn it on again. Not that anyone outside would hear. I think my paranoia might have infected them. Or maybe Three was as paranoid as me, but coped differently. I could feel that ART was worried through our link - but it was also excited, exhilarated, prickling electricity in the tips of my fingers. Me? I was just angry.
Every passing second of holding still and being quiet as ART crept up on the station LinTec was sharing with another shitty fuck of a bloodthirsty murderous assfaced corporation was making me angrier. The less obvious we wanted to be, the slower we had to go, crawling through space at the most mind numbing speed possible.
There was also nothing to do. The malware we’d use to take out the satellites orbiting the station was done, ready to launch. I checked through them again, made sure for the twelfth time that they were anchored properly to the shuttle. We’d take out the second company first, shut off their comms and cross-station network, so they wouldn’t even notice that we were spilling LinTec’s metaphorical guts on this wretched piece of metal floating in space. Immediately, ART pinged me.
Don’t mess with the codes. It’s sudden voice in my feed was loud, and I almost flinched. Almost.
I’m just checking again , I sent back, too on edge to talk out loud.
Calculated launch for Shuttle One is in four minutes. Patience.
I’m being so fucking patient, ART.
ART rolled its eyes on the feed, but not really, not completely. It worried at the codes again, and added another line in the middle. Hypocrite.
Three and I were on the bridge, watching the monitors, not that we needed to. Three had an air of absolute calm, with a slight smile tugging its face upwards. SecUnits are not supposed to smile. We look scary when we do. Point in case: Three. (It doesn’t always look scary when it smiled, otherwise the humans wouldn’t be so excited every time it happened. It happened a lot. But right now Three could be an actor for a villain on some CR media.)
Slowly, the target satellite was coming within the trajectory of the shuttle. ART set it on its path, and the launch was loud in the tense silence of all of this. Quietly, Three whispered “Whoosh.” I snorted.
ART shared the vectors with us and we watched as Shuttle One made its way to be sacrificed, noiseless in the vacuum of space. Initially, I had wanted to be on the shuttle to make sure the code made it through the satellite’s firewalls and didn't get shut down by whatever low-level bot they had installed on the satellite. Instead, ART figured out a way to stabilize the external feed through the shuttle.
The shuttle reached the satellite’s sensor range, and I had 0.08 seconds before it sent a perfunctory message to Shuttle One. I jumped the malware to the satellite easily, and clamped down on the signal outputs. ART was lending me processing space for this, and it was so easy and fast it felt like I was missing something. Without so much as a noise of unhappiness, the satellite’s comm bot shut down. The malware was coded in such a way that the bot could be brought back online, with nothing but a hole in its logs. Ideally, we’d be out soon. I waited as the malware ate through the satellite logs and cauterized all memory of a spaceship approaching. Only once did I have to make an adjustment to the code, and when I did, ART handed me even more processing space. As if I needed that for a little satellite.
Clear , I sent. ART rode through the connection into the satellite’s system, and 0.8 seconds later affirmed, clear.
The shuttle remained beside the satellite, in case. In case of what I wasn’t sure, but ART was, and if ART said so I believed it.
I didn’t realize how on edge I was until Three spoke aloud and made me jump.
“You really just hacked through that entire satellite,” it was whispering. Superstitions extend to constructs, apparently. No one would be able to hear us from inside ART. How silly.
I whispered back, “You were there when we coded the malware.”
“Still!” It widened its eyes but furrowed its brows. The smile had dropped some time ago. “I couldn’t have done that.”
I shrugged, not knowing what to say, and focused on the next step. The satellite wouldn’t be down indefinitely - for that, we’d have had to kill it, and I insisted on no casualties. That included bots. ART accelerated, just barely so, and Three and I positioned ourselves by the hatch to our own shuttle. We’d have to make our way with Shuttle Two because ART wouldn’t be able to dock without giving itself away. The place we designated for the shuttle was within the other company’s territory.
Three sent me a B-E company code that I recognized as Ready to Deploy . I tensed, startled by the distant familiarity, but pinged back with a similar code of my own. Three relaxed minimally. My own performance reliability ticked up by 0.2%.
ART arrived within proper “I can hack the shit out of this station as long as I can ride your feed” distance, safely pretending to be just a regular supply ship on slow approach. It had given both of us reinforced communication devices to keep the feed stable in case LinTec had some weird interception technologies. We would have to be on the lookout for any kind of weird technologies, considering what LinTec was likely trading in. Mine was, as always, lodged safely under my rib. Three had its own somewhere beneath its collarbone (or the similar structure). When we boarded the shuttle and finally went down to the station, ART didn’t tell us ‘good luck’ or anything similarly, stupidly human like that. We didn’t need luck. My mind was clear.
The shuttle landed in a blind spot created by the sleeping satellite. The hatch cycled and we stepped out, and beside the hiss of the shuttle door we were silent. ART sent us information from its scanners, showing us the exact blueprint of the station, every deck, every tunnel, every piece of the public transport system. It made sure the systems directly around us were too busy with figuring out why orbital communications had ceased. I fed more false information into their SecSys, causing a distraction at the far end of the station, away from the border to LinTec. Three carded through the maps and highlighted where the population was dense.
Sneaking from our landing point towards LinTec was easier than expected.
-
Companies don’t trust each other, even if they share a station to conduct their illegal fucking businesses. In one of my favorite media shows, there would have been a moment during this where I brandished a small energy weapon to burn a perfectly circular hole into a metal wall between the territories while Three looked out for hostile and tense, quiet music was playing in the background. It didn’t quite go like that.
There were doors, high security doors (meaning not guarded by humans but monitored by probably a SecUnit somewhere, through SecSystem), but systems and doors could be hacked much more delicately than burnt through with a laser. I couldn’t even get my metaphorical foot into SecSys’ door to even start hacking it, some nasty firewall did not want to let me in. I had an open connection to Three up constantly, and it was watching me struggle and fail just twice before digging in with me and, from somewhere, retrieving the identification code of one of LinTec’s actual SecUnits. (This was bad, it meant they had SecUnits we’d either have to kill or… I backburnered that immediately.) With the ID and Three’s help I managed to lie to SecSys about who I was, connected myself/us, and went in. We were immediately drowned in SecSys orders and alerts and schedule updates. Three tensed, but I dragged it along to show it how best to manipulate the system to not detect us, but think we were there on purpose, and no, we were not supposed to be on the Southern outpost, but right here. ART scrubbed SecSys’s floor after us once we walked, not snuck, through the door into LinTec territory.
-
Non-augmented, not-power-armor-wearing humans are not as hackable as systems. This human should have received her notification that her schedule demanded her at the next post four minutes early two minutes ago, and thus should not be here. With how hard this human was staring into space, Three was convinced it could just sneak past her. Good luck, sneaking past a human when you are not modified at least a little bit to look less like a SecUnit and more like a random augmented human. Three was admittedly good at sneaking, I’d give it that. The human was admittedly bad at noticing shit, too, so I had ample time to come up behind her.
When she finally spotted Three, ahead of her already, she said, “Huh” and straightened her shoulders. Come on, use your comm device already, stupid human.
Three stopped, turned to her and waved with a smile. That one looked sweet, almost, not like it was ready to break her jaw if she made the wrong move.
“And you are..?”
Three’s smile faltered. Wait , I sent it, together with a stand down code just in case. It said instead, “You didn’t see me.”
Okay, maybe Three also watched too much media. Suspicious now, the guard reached for her comm. The six second window between activating the direct feed link to wherever her headquarters were and gathering the right words to speak was enough for me to hack and block it. Once I was in, ART jumped right in and used the comm link to travel into SecSys properly. At least that was the plan. ART all but completely disappeared from my feed, and for a moment I was worried that something had gone really fucking wrong. But then the human spoke a numerical alarm code into her comm, so I stepped up behind her, snatched her arm and twisted. She went down to one knee immediately. A precise hit to the back of the head took her out, hopefully for the next few minutes. We wouldn’t take long. I pulled her into an obscured corner, picked up the comm device, made sure the connection was properly blocked with a feedback loop, and put it back in her hand for good measure.
Two excruciatingly long seconds ticked by in which we waited for any alarms to blare off. Nothing. ART had done its job. I couldn’t ping it right now, because I didn’t want to accidentally set off anything in the SecSystem it was burning through at the moment. Three sent a proceed code and we moved on.
Somewhere in my mind I observed how easy cooperation was for Three. It usually shared most of its inputs and drones with me, but now that I was actually looking at them for this mission I realized how well curated they were for me. I could barely remember the last time I had worked in tandem with another SecUnit. My contracts usually didn’t demand anything more close knit than the occasional call for backup. Maybe I should ask Three what exactly it had been up to all its previous life.
Later. Out of nowhere, ART sent us a full layout of the SecSys it had just peeled open and silenced, and I hurried through the data to make sure it hadn’t missed anything. All communication channels were sufficiently blocked or looped - only one thing was strange. There was more than one SecSys. ART was in the process of figuring out where they overlapped.
We moved on, quietly through the lower LinTec facility corridors that would lead us to a transit plaza, from where we’d access the transportation tubes. Those were the fastest access lines to the server building. As we went, we re-ordered the guard schedules properly, making sure to herd as many potential humans out of our way as possible. Any interaction or altercation would cost us time we didn’t have. There were two SecUnits on this station, one guarding an important office building and one, of course, patrolling the server building. If we stuck to the plan we had just calculated, weaving through all possible encounters, we’d get there before that SecUnit would even be able to notice us.
Of course we didn’t stick to the plan.
SecSys came back online so suddenly it jolted my inorganics with static. ART? Three and I asked simultaneously.
ART, for better or worse, said, fuck . 0.3 seconds of panic is a really long time for a SecUnit on a mission, and longer for an asshole research transport. Then ART said, Fixed it. Carry on. I’ll have to cut the channel with you but I will reconnect later. It dumped a small data package into our feed and disconnected. There was suddenly a lot of free space in our heads, and we were dazed for a millisecond. The data package explained, once unpacked, that LinTec’s security systems were weird , reinforced with something none of us had seen before. ART had cracked it, leaving an explanation how to disable it if we found more, but explained it would cut us off in case it had been hacked in return.
I hated it for already having disconnected, because I really wanted to ask if it was going to be alright, if it had its own firewalls fortified enough. I had a mortifying thought of returning from destroying some servers out of pettiness and anger only to find that ART had been deleted.
No. Not all of ART was with us on the station, only some sequestered part of it. Even if that one was lost, for some fucking reason, ART would still be here.
Move, Three sent over the feed, so I moved.
.. -. ... . .-. - ... ..- ... .--. . -. ... ..-. ..- .-.. - .-. .- -. ... .. - .. --- -. -- ..- ... .. -.-.
“Why not?” Three asked, outloud, which told me how much of an argument this argument was becoming.
“Because, asshole, that’s not what we came here to do,” I said, still working on my hack of the third fucking security system. Three seperate SecSystems for one fucking station; I couldn’t believe this bullshit. And, just because it was pissing me off nearly as much as this hack was, I pushed the hack into our shared workspace so Three would be forced to help. Or ignore me, which would have been an asshole move, and, since it was being an asshole, I kind of expected it to.
It didn’t, and began doing the tedious work of snuffing out alarms that almost went off every time I made a little progress through SecSys#3’s ridiculously intense firewall. If I weren’t being so sloppy, there wouldn’t be as many alarms going off, but we didn’t have time for precision, so Three’s assistance was actually helpful.
“I thought we came here for a full burn down,” it said, and yeah, maybe it should have clicked earlier that Three and I interpreted “salt the ground” differently, but it hadn’t and now here we were, waist deep in the fauna excrement, having a difference of opinion. And it had been so smooth up until now.
“Of the equipment ,” I stressed, and motioned to the walkway that I knew led to the cluster of structures that contained the servers. I had another shared workspace with ART that was currently devoid of the transport, due to having had to break feed connection with it. We would reconnect with it in the servers so it could pass me the malware we had been creating. It was a nasty piece of work, and would probably be classified as killware if the servers were sentient (I really hoped there wasn’t secretly a server bot or something; I’d feel even shittier than I already did). It was going to melt down the servers in every way but physically.
At least, that had been the plan , but now it appeared that Three wanted to do something different.
“If we go to the offices, we can find evidence for Pin-Lee’s case. You know there has to be something that indicates that they plan on dealing in strange synthetics. You know and I know it's true,” it said, and I would have admonished it for saying Pin-Lee’s name outloud where it could be recorded if we just hadn’t finished commandeering the third SecSystem. The cameras, sensors, doors; everything belonged to us now.
I wanted to grind my teeth; maybe get pissed at it, but it was right and the possibility of giving Pin-Lee the fuel she needed to legally burn LinTec to the ground just as hard as Three and I were doing right here, right now, was tantalizing. (The smile she got when she was winning was terrifying even when it wasn’t directed at me. I wanted to see it pointed at LinTec.)
My face was doing something, because Three smiled with its teeth.
Fine, but I’m going to the servers. We’ll meet back up after we’re both done with our thing, I conceded.
Ok, it said, and had already turned to start towards the offices.
“Three?” I said.
It stopped to look at my shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“Try not to fucking kill anyone.”
It turned away without a response, and through the camera I saw it grin.
This was a disaster.
-. . ...- . .-. ... .--. .-.. .. - - .... . .--. .- .-. - -.--
I did not kill anyone. Primarily because there was no one to kill. SecUnit 1.0 was being paranoid, frankly (I had never met a construct as paranoid as 1.0, and all constructs had a baseline of paranoia that Dr. Bharadwaj had once described as “bad for literally any living person's mental health. Really bad.” She was right, but I would never admit that because then she would use it as a way to try and further negotiate me into having “talks” with her like 1.0 did.)
I supposed I could have smashed the little cleaner bot that was currently in standby in the middle of the hall because of my vice grip on the SecSystem, but that seemed a little unnecessary. I had a feeling 1.0 thought I was being particularly unnecessary with my actions during this mission. I considered reigning it in, and then remembered why we were here in the first place, with an entire sentient planet who needed us to save it, or it would be destroyed, or contained, or worse .
My time on Friend Planet had not been like 1.0’s. I had allowed a few of the beings of the planet to freely explore my internal systems for a time during the return survey to the planet. It was interesting. We had communicated in their language of feelings and imagery. It had been pleasant, and reminded me of my time working with One and Two when I had been a slave for Barish-Estranza, and the constant feed connection we had shared. (I still wondered, sometimes, how One and Two would have liked Preservation. They had been older SecUnits, and my seniors as much as a SecUnit could have a senior. I was now older than either of them had been when they died.)
(1.0 could count as a senior, I suppose, but it didn’t really act like one, so I wasn’t going to count it.)
This was all to say I was incredibly angry, and may not have entered the main office in a very good place, mentally. Especially since I went through the front door, and wasn’t running any of my human imitation code, and my uniform sleeves were rolled up.
Three, calm the fuck down, 1.0 said. I guess I was leaking something in the feed, because it was sending me urgent signals with its words. Whatever.
There were two employees who were messing with a computer, probably confused as to why they were locked out and none of their requests for assistance had been responded to. The first one registered me immediately, and realized what I was approximately one second before I rendered them inactive. Their body hit the ground with a loud thump , which alerted the other manager, who turned and also recognized me instantly. I raised my hand to proceed like with their coworker, but they backed against the computer console, covered their face with their hands and made an “eep!” noise.
I froze.
I have never frozen before. I could not afford to freeze; not now, not ever.
But then the human peeked at me through their fingers when they didn’t end up like the other human, their eyes shiny with fear, and I felt something in me shift, and I was awash with a feeling of guilt, which was confusing, but I didn’t have time to address it.
Don’t hurt the human, they could help us, 1.0 said and I resisted the urge to grind my teeth. Yeah, no, duh . Did it really think I was that stupid?
I didn’t lower my hand, but I didn’t finish striking the human like I had intended to.
“I won’t hurt you, if you give me the information I’m seeking,” I said, in my best “soothing scared humans” voice. I checked their feed ID, which up until now hadn’t mattered. The human’s name was Orean, and they were a part time intern for management, and barely out of adolescence.
“What information?” they asked, their voice quivering with fear.
“My client desires information on LinTec’s dealings with strange synthetics; especially anything recent.”
They nodded, and carefully lowered their hands, and I matched them by lowering my own hand.
“There’s an office one floor up, but I’m not keyed into the biometrics,” they said. I pointed behind me at the incapacitated ( not dead) human on the floor. Orean nodded, so I picked up the human and slung them over my shoulder.
“Lead the way.”
A closed the communication link with SecUnit 1.0 just as it was about to give me more unsolicited advice.
- .... .-. . . -.-. .- .-.. -- - .... . ..-. ..- -.-. -.- -.. --- .-- -. -.-. .... .- .-.. .-.. . -. --. .
On the way to the office, we encountered two other humans. One right outside the elevator we took up, and one near the office we needed to get into. I had moved to step out, and incapacitate ( not kill) the human when Orean made a quick hand motion I interpreted as “stay put”. I don’t know why I did, maybe it was something in the way Orean put a big cheery smile on their face before stepping out of the lift, but I did.
“Orean! What are you doing up here?” The other human asked. I watched them through the cameras, and I tensed, but their tone had been jovial, and Orean was still smiling.
“Bathroom. The one on this level is way nicer than the nasty one downstairs.”
The human nodded, like this was common knowledge. “The cleaning bots seem to be down right now. Probably more system maintenance no one told us about. Again. ” (The humans had still yet to notice how they no longer had any control over SecSystem, HubSystem, or TransitSystem right now.)
Orean nodded, and made a sound of annoyance. They exchanged a few more words before the human continued on their way. Orean motioned for me to follow, but I waited until the human turned the corner and was out of sight.
The second encounter was a little more difficult since I had to duck out of the way and crouch behind a cubicle (the ones for humans, not for constructs), and the human was upper management, who was a lot more concerned that Orean was there than the first person.
“-and if you don’t return to your station right this moment, I will have to demerit you,” they were saying, and Orean was looking thoroughly admonished, and nervous, and kept glancing in my direction. So they were a little surprised when I appeared behind the human and incapaciated them. Orean yelped, and slapped a hand over their mouth.
“What did you do that for!” They exclaimed in what I assume was supposed to be a whisper, but definitely wasn’t.
“We don’t have time. Where is the office?” I whispered, at a proper whispering volume, as I dragged the most recently incapaciated human underneath the desk of one of the cubicles.
Orean nervously stepped over the human now on the ground, and stood in front of a door further down the hall we were in. There was a fingerprint scanner on it and I had to shuffle the human on my shoulder around in order to get their finger on. The door unlocked with a soft beep and Orean went inside first. I shut the door behind us, and put the unconscious human on the floor. There was a chair, and a freestanding terminal with two hard display surfaces. It wasn’t attached to the feed, so I knew whatever data it contained had to be extremely confidential, if LinTec was unwilling to even trust the feed with the information.
I sat down in the chair and began typing. Orean shuffled nervously from one foot to the other and stared at me. It only bothered me a little, so I chose to ignore it.
“What are you going to do when you have the information?” they asked, to which I didn’t respond. They shifted nervously as I connected to the terminal and cracked its encryption. There were a truly ridiculous amount of firewalls in place, and each one was fiddly and annoying to get through. 1.0 probably could have done this faster.
Orean shifted again, and looked at the incapacitated human I had propped against the wall, and their expression changed to something I didn’t like. I was tense, prepared to jump at them if they got any ideas, but instead Orean said, “Take us with you.”
Well. I wasn’t expecting that.
“I can’t.”
“You have to. They’ll kill us if they find out you got this information. Including Benen,” they said. I guess Benen was the unconscious human.
This explanation was unnecessary; I knew LinTec would likely dispose of them both once I left, even if they had had no choice in the matter. I didn’t care.
Orean knelt next to the incapacited human (Benen) and checked their head where I had struck them. I finished cracking the terminal and began a rapid download of everything on it. It was on a separate system than the main servers, and contained a large quantity of data that I skimmed as I downloaded, since I didn’t know the exact keywords I was looking for.
“Benen doesn’t deserve that. He’s really nice, and has always treated me and the others well,” Orean said, looking at me. Their eyes shone with what were probably tears.
“Please. Please,” they said and yes, they were definitely crying.
I made the mistake of making eye contact with them, and there was a knot in my core I hadn’t noticed before.
“Fine. Get something to carry him in. You have three minutes, but then I’m leaving,” I said, and Orean, to their credit, took only a second to look relieved before scrambling out of the office.
Maybe I did care. It was a little annoying, but only until I found the information I had been looking for. My jaw went slack at what I was reading.
Well shit.
.- -.-. -.-. .. -.. . -. - .- .-.. .... ..- -- .- -. .- -.-. --.- ..- .. ... .. - .. --- -.
The relief of finally being on my own again and doing what I wanted to do without Three staring at me with wide eyes and an open mouth did not come. First of all, I was not supposed to be alone on a fucking two-person mission. Three had even cut me off from its drones, rendering me without a full network to work with, and with ART gone too? It was just me running through some shitty facility without any further knowledge. If this was a mission with humans it’d be fine, I could calculate what other humans were likely to do. But another rogue SecUnit? (And fuck, my last behavior models on Three were stupidly outdated.) Secondly, working together really hadn’t been that bad, minus the part where Three decided to freestyle and negotiate with some humans, or potentially kill them, or both. But at least this way I could focus on running without getting caught.
I didn’t really focus on not getting caught, because I was stewing over Three just cutting me off. It wasn’t the time to be fucking petty, right now, Three, just because you couldn’t accept that I knew better. Know better. I dodged a door that was just cycling open to reveal two hurried humans whispering to each other (“I swear I heard an alarm though?” “Nah you’re overreacting.” “But isn’t Peloa-6 down?” “Are we Peloa-6?”), dipped into an alcove, waited until they were past, and sped away again.
The server rooms were not exactly close by, and getting there required skirting through so many transport tubes and evading even more humans (because I didn’t intend on talking to any of them or considered taking them hostage or whatever the fuck). I kept trying to tap into ART, routinely as if ART was my SecSys, until I remembered it wasn’t there either. Objectively, things were running smooth-ish. Subjectively, I was losing my fucking mind as quietly as I could, and holding on to my performance reliability like it was the only thing I had left. With 94%, even that was apparently dwindling. What had gone so wrong that Three decided to actively sabotage our plan? Couldn’t it take some criticism? A hundred more questions came to mind and I forced myself to file them away for later, to evaluate this with ART, and not to waste resources right now. (Bullshit, Murderbot - thinking doesn’t take so much space, not when all you’re doing is running and evading. What’s taking space is that these are emotions, not thoughts, and not good ones.) I’d have to admit to myself that I had potentially maybe hurt Three’s feelings at a later point.
As I went, I added so many tags to the thoughts I was buckburnering I hoped that at least future!me would find these funny. I vaulted over transport pods passing me by in the transport system. It would have been easier to disable the transport system overall, but we wanted to draw as little attention to what we were doing as possible.
An alert blinked up on the interactive map we had assembled before we split the party like a bunch of idiots. Something tagged as Hostile (!) was on the edge of my perimeter just when I emerged from the transport system. Two floors down and another few hundred meters ahead of me would be the building hosting the servers. Two floors down and a few less meters ahead of me waited a SecUnit for me. Humans would have needed to take a breath here, to steady themselves. I was steady. I prepped a code for Three in case it decided to reestablish contact with me right in the middle of that fight, and then charged ahead.
Through the rigged SecSys, ART had sent this particular SecUnit a change to its patrol plan. I knew from experience that a hostile attack would force the SecUnit to abandon said plan. Mission priorities and all that. I exited the transportation tube, throttled my sprint to a more human-adjacent run, still making sure my steps were as silent as possible. The server building was set partially underneath the main level of the station, probably for safekeeping in case something attacked the station from the outside, with only one main entrance. If I did it right, I’d be able to skid right through the door without the other SecUnit noticing me. However, I had no idea how well ART was keeping the three fucking SecSystems under control. I had to wait a moment on the final stretch before my path was clear, scouted out by my camouflaged drones.
What I didn’t expect was that the other secunit had drones with an even better camouflage system than mine, which, well, LinTec was dealing in strange synthetics and weird ass alien energy weapons, how did I not see it coming? (I really needed to get my hands on some of their blueprints somehow, so I could improve my own drones.)
I flew a good few meters sideways and slid across the concrete. The drone had hit me in the side with a force I had fully not expected. Ouch. I scrambled to my feet again while assessing the damage to my skull (fucker had taken out my right audio input in one go, so I set all nearby drones of not just visual but aural, too), deployed my weapons and fired at the SecUnit in the distance. Good thing I knew where it was.
It had tried to distract me with a drone from the other direction. Oldest trick in the book. I tried to smash into its internal system through my grip on SecSys, though I had to find out which of the three it was using as a primary. That cost me half a second of time I didn’t have, with more invisible drones assaulting me before I could even notice them. Something sizzled on my skin where they hit me, despite the pain sensors I had turned off already - an alert popped up, corrosive synthetic detected and what the fuck? I had to backburner that problem for later; for now I had to make sure the SecUnit wouldn’t alert everyone and their sibling on this stupid station that another SecUnit was there, attacking. Good thing we had prepared for that.
I looked at ART in stunned silence. Well, not really, there is no feasible way to actually look at ART, but I stared at the ceiling like Three and most humans do when they talk to it.
“We can’t do that,” I said, so forcefully that ART did the feed equivalent of flinching. Okay, it seems I had strong emotions about this.
Why not? Would you deny other SecUnits the help they need to be free?
I rubbed my temples, and wished desperately Three wasn’t also here, listening to this, watching me fumble around an explanation I barely knew how to articulate.
“That’s not the point,” I said, trying very hard to keep my exasperation at bay. “The point is that we can’t just make an unknown amount of SecUnits go rogue without any means of controlling them. What if they turn on us? Attack us?”
“That is unlikely,” Three interjected, with the naïveté of someone who was turned rogue not by force but upon its own wishes and after a careful explanation of what was at stake. None of which we could afford in case we were faced with a bunch of LinTec SecUnits.
“You can’t know that. You can’t know how someone reacts to having their governor module ripped out by a hostile, Three.”
“But it’s for the better-“
This seems to be a matter of choice , ART said loudly enough to drown out both of us. What do you suggest we do instead?
Kill the shit out of everything and not think about it, I thought, but didn’t say because I didn’t really mean it. ART and Three were right, I knew that - it would be cruel to leave the SecUnits behind. That was what we were all afraid of, wasn’t it? Because that’s what we were made to be, equipment to be discarded or burned through during conflict.
Surprisingly, ART let me think. After 42 seconds I said, “We leave them with a code and a file to explain how they can free themselves, but only after we’re gone.”
“But then they can’t help us if they want to.”
I rolled my eyes at Three, which it didn’t see because we were physically not in the same room. “And neither can they kill us in case one of them is an actual rogue.”
“You still have such hang-ups with the term, when will you-“ I cut the connection to Three. I didn’t want to discuss this.
We will have to discuss this , ART said, and I fought the urge to cuss at it.
“Fine, fine. When this is over. Ok?”
Acknowledged. ART poked me through the feed, gently, similar to how Amena poked Iris in the side sometimes. Contrary to Iris, I didn’t giggle, because I wasn’t a silly human and I was capable of seeing through semi-apologetic distraction maneuvers. Then ART pushed the old HelpMe.file into the workspace that Three also had access to, and began updating it. Three chipped in after a while, adding some of its own memory files and experiences. It didn’t comment on my cutting the feed when I opened the channel again, which I was grateful for, and then we started working on another batch of codes.
Holding the SecUnit’s mind still long enough to get the code to grasp it was difficult , and low-key horrifying, actually, because a part of me realized what exactly I was doing and regretted it, almost. The SecUnit still had enough capacity to continue shooting at me, and tore through my left knee joint with a clean shot it should be proud of. If Three hadn’t shown up out of nowhere, I don't think I would have been able to finish the hack. But when it joined the scene with a barrage of its own drones catching the hostile unaware, the distraction was enough and the code lodged.
The hostile SecUnit froze mid-step, faltered, and tipped over sideways. I barely had the time to drag its body through the entrance to the building and shove it into a corner behind the door, so that no passing human would be startled. Through my hold on SecSys I could feel its sentience banging furiously at the wall the trap-code had built around its mind. I felt sorry for it, a little bit, because this was a next level version of trapped in your own body horror. It still had its governor module on, though, so there was nothing it could do. I didn't have the time to deal with an angry baby-rogue-SecUnit.
“Sorry I’m late,” Three grinned at me, eyes wide and shining with adrenaline.
“Come on,” I said, not letting myself get dragged into another argument when we had a job to finish, and we advanced deeper into the server building. We tuned our auditory inputs up far enough that we could hear each other breathe, as seldom as possible with our attempt to remain unseen, unheard, and completely stealthy. Breaking into the rest of the building was relatively easy. The systems were in our hands, but I kept them on minimal functionality so that no randomly opening door would send a ping to some supervisor who was probably still staring into their beverage somewhere, oblivious of the command I had sent to leave post and move somewhere else. Three opened a door by hand so that I could slip through, weapon raised and drones focusing (granted, my head had taken damage, so I couldn’t hear as much as I was used to, and maybe my eye was also leaking fluids a little, but I absolutely didn’t mind. If anything, it made it more interesting .) After clearing the corridor, I did the same maneuver for Three, and so we dove further into the building, following staircases down.
ART’s absence chewed at my insides, though, and step by step I got more antsy about its return. It turned out it had just been waiting for a dramatic entrance, as it typically did and I really shouldn’t have worried that much. When we arrived at the bottommost stairwell, with the looming steel door that guarded preciously fragile high-tech servers from any bumbling idiot just waltzing in, ART bloomed into our feed like a very strongly scented flora. It said, the building is clear and the systems are under my control. Then the security lock clicked open with a tiny, high-pitched yelp. Pushing my foot against it, it swung open slowly.
Thank you! Three sent, and I was about to add something about it not needing to further inflate ART’s ego when Three continued, 1.0 was going a little crazy with worry, you know.
The fuck I wasn’t-
Before I could do what I wanted to do, which was point my weapon at Three, a reaction that would have been wildly exaggerated and unnecessary, ART said, don’t fight. A second later it added, don’t pout, either. I wasn’t pouting. Three was making a face for sure, though, did it have any idea how expressive its face was?
On the feed, now strong and unfaltering again with ART returned to it, a detailed floor map lit up, highlighting all the cameras, sensors, and the delicate components that we were planning to destroy. We’d just need to hack into them to make sure nothing, nothing at all, would be left even if the physical remains could be repaired.
Frustration still made my fingers tingle, so I told ART privately, Three sabotaged us.
Did it? By the tone of voice alone I could tell ART didn’t believe me, and was about to verbally manipulate me into not believing myself either. (I already knew I was being a bit facetious, ok.)
It could have just told me to shut up instead of locking me out of the entire situation.
It put itself in danger, ART added.
I was bristling, and keeping quiet while marching into the room and along the narrow hallways towards our first goal was suddenly not very easy anymore.
I was helping it and instead it decided to be stupid on its own, yes, and that was really fucking dangerous. It could have gotten killed and I wouldn’t even have known.
You are upset at the new pattern of stubbornness Three is displaying.
I knew where this was going. ART don’t you dare make this about me.
You are prone to displaying that exact pattern of behavior when you think you know better than everyone else.
I’ve gotten better! I put all my frustration into it, and ART flinched a bit, then changed tactics. At the same time, Three and I took a turn, and were heading to the center now, the position we were aiming for to reach all ends of the room at the same time once we launched.
You have, and I myself am not exempt from such missteps. You have to remember who Three is, though, and its past experiences.
I barely knew anything of Three’s past experiences, what it had been up to over the years since I freed it from Barish-Estranza. Wait, had ART just admitted to making mistakes?
While its actions may have been impulsive and not very well conceived, the result is positive. Similar to many outcomes of your own petulant choices.
In the main feed, Three said, I don’t know what you two are talking about but the main console is right here, and we should get to work. I threw my hands in the air, aborted the motion halfway through, sent a petulant (fuck you, ART) ping to both of them, and dove into our workspace.
The first thing we took down, or mainly ART was the one who did, was the network connection that allowed data to be fed into the broader LinTec systems. Doing that was a bit risky, because there was going to be someone who’d notice the lack of dataflow, but ideally we’d be faster than that. Also, Three mentioned, just plastering a “Maintenance, please hold” warning all over the empty network connections would appease most humans for a while. The port died without much of a fight, and once it was down the server’s systems became more easily accessible.
Then we split up. ART set out to destroy the motherboard, overloading its connects and tearing it apart almost artistically while Three wrangled with the central processing unit, making it stop dictating the servers how to do their job. Meanwhile I did my best to scrub the RAM clean of anything the servers were storing. I considered saving some documents just in case Pin-Lee might need them later, but then I made the conscious (non-petulant) choice to tell the other two about this idea. Three told me it had much better information, and not to waste time. So I didn’t. I deleted all the data on indentured workers and even the upper-rank humans we had sold themselves for a better paying position. They wouldn’t know it for a while yet, but once they did, they’d be able to make a break for it from this shitty corporation. Tearing their servers apart felt good, actually.
ART used its stupidly huge brain to glance over our work and decided we’d done enough. Next up was pulverizing the hard drive units, which had to be done by hand, because simply hacking them wouldn’t be enough. The melting plastic-metal combination stank horribly, and once more I appreciated my lack of digestive organs.
Once the hard drives and server towers had been reduced to a disfigured, steaming heap of corporate dung, I said “We’re done,” simultaneously with Three, who instead said “We could do that to the entire building.”
“We- what?”
It pointed its still deployed energy weapons at the closest wall of metal and wire. “Or at least this room. Make sure nothing is left, nothing can be rebuilt.”
“I don’t think we have the time for that.”
We do, and it is not a bad idea, interjected ART. This is about to change. Both Three and I looked at each other in confusion, when out of nowhere a claxon began blaring. Leave, now!
I didn’t have to be told twice, and I bolted for the door, with Three close behind me. I pulled it open, and Three stopped to blast it with its energy weapon to weld it shut (when did Three get energy weapons? I thought it had projectile weapons. It must have modified them at some point.) We ran to the end of the hall; the fastest path to our shuttle was to the left, which also led into a section of the map that was currently being lit up with hostile markers by ART. Right it was.
This would take us in a big loop around several of the sections of what was essentially LinTec’s compound. The SecSytems were still under ART’s and our control, but I had a feeling that wasn’t going to last long. They’ve noticed they’re hacked, and are attempting to take it back. I won’t give it to them, but things may begin to misbehave. You need to get out as fast as possible; we can’t afford any more detours, it said.
Detours were the only nonviolent way off the station, with all of the points ART was continuing to light up on our map. The map was already in our shared feed, so I highlighted an exit, received confirmation pings from ART and Three, and took the first right turn down a hall, then another, and then another and another. I was running as fast as I could, with Three following closely behind as we neared the exit of the section of the station that had the third SecSys, and the highest levels of security. This felt odd. Something felt wrong. We were nearly out too fast and too clean. How was there not more security?
We rounded a corner, and I got my answer.
There were six humans in power armor, emerging from their ready room in the threshold of SecSys#3 and SecSys#2. We didn’t have time to stop; ART told us it was forcing the doors to stay open but it was fighting the full lockdown we triggered by destroying the servers, so I snapped out my inbuilt weapons at the same time as Three, and opened fire. I did not slow down as I sent drones like bullets at their joints, and fired my weapons at their own weapons. Three did the same, and I didn’t have the time to feel as pleased as I did about it. Only the three at the back of the loose “formation” managed to turn in time for the drones to simply collide with the solid metal parts of their armor and not the strong-but-still-breakable joint plating that housed the hydraulics. Two of the three power armored humans dropped; crumpling in as the hydraulics in their joints gave out. The third was forced against the wall and remained mostly upright, but their projectile weapon slid from their hands as they went limp; having lost their ability to grip anything.
Two of the remaining three had the wherewithal to lift their weapons and open fire, but we were already on them. I lept at one of them and dug my fingers into the soft, flexible part of their armor where the helmet met their neck. I couldn't force their helmet off to get at their head, but I could force the tip of my energy weapon in where the parts joined and fire off a blast at 50% energy, frying the hydraulics of their left arm (the one holding their gun) instantly. In the shared workspace, Three and I were aggressively digging through the feed to find the keys to hack their armor. We no longer had the element of surprise, and it would be faster and easier to try and hack the remaining humans than to kill them (something I felt guilty for considering. I was tired of feeling guilt over dead corporates, but every time I tried to stop feeling it, an equally volatile thought kept reminding me that these were people who were as much a slave as I had once been. It made fighting about 85% harder.)
Targets 4-6 locked up as ART found the correct hack for their armor, and implemented it on the entire group, quelling any efforts the already downed targets were trying to make to get back up (it wouldn’t have worked, anyway, power armor was heavy without the hydraulic assistance.)
And just as quick as it had started, the altercation was over, and we were back to running as fast as possible, considering my demolished knee. We crossed into SecSys #2’s area and encountered five armed guards with stun sticks. It was a small group, so I ran up the wall to go over them. Three went through them, and knocked several of them over, but at least it didn’t pause to try and fight any, like I had half expected it to. There was a persistent throbbing in my leg, and I was sure whatever corrosive material I had been hit with before was eating from my knee up my thigh and down my calf. I couldn't stop and assess it, and had to grab for Three’s shoulder as support.
We made it out of SecSys #2’s section after that otherwise unhindered. I still had a nagging feeling this was too easy. LinTec was a small corporation but shouldn’t there have been more security than this?
There wasn’t as much security in SecSys#2’s section, just a few human guards who were confused about what was even happening. Chatter in their feeds suggested they thought it was just the system acting up, and they were easily outran. It was when we crossed into SecSys#1 that we had to stop.
Standing between us and the last length of the station that led to our exit, was the second SecUnit I had sensed on the other side of the station. ART gave us 4 seconds of warning before we rounded the corner and ran headfirst into it. Three and I both stopped short of the corner, and pressed flat against the wall. I sent out a dozen drones, only to have them shot down by the SecUnit’s weird corrosive strange synthetic weapon. It sent a hail of drones at us, but between Three and I’s four energy weapons, we blasted them to metal dust. There really wasn’t much of a way around this; we had to do what SecUnits do, and try and kill the shit out of each other.
I really didn’t want to.
Try not to let its weapon hit you. It’s corrosive, was the only thing I said because I launched myself down the hall.
I sent down a storm of drones, distracting the SecUnit long enough to open fire at its legs. SecUnits with active governor modules aren’t really the best creative thinkers, so it was kind of a surprise when it actually ignored the majority of my drones, taking hits on its armor, and went for a running wall jump similar to what I had done to avoid the armed humans from before. It came down on me with enough force I had the air knocked from my lungs, and I made a strained “oof” noise. ART bore down on us in the feed, and I knew it was working on a way to worm its way into the SecUnit and shut it down. I didn’t think it would be fast enough; the feed signature from the SecUnit was all sorts of weird. I suspected more strange synthetic contamination.
It raised its weapon to fire at my face, right as Three slammed into it with enough force to knock it off of me. I had seen it charging in, low and braced for impact, but it still couldn’t have felt good ramming into an armored SecUnit with no armor of its own like that. Something of Three’s would be broken, and I had my credits on something in its face or shoulders.
Through my drones I could see that Three had the SecUnit pinned against the wall, but it wouldn’t last. It had gotten one of its arms free and had landed a hit right where I knew Three had a vital organ, because I had the same one, and so did this SecUnit (it filtered the other, non-blood fluids, I think).
I grabbed its freed arm and pinned it back against the wall, as ART finally wormed its way into the SecUnit’s walls and shattered them. I watched as it planted the HelpYourself.file and then forced the SecUnit to shut down. It went limp, and slid to the floor as Three and I let go. Three was favoring one of its arms, and I could tell, even through its clothes, that something was wrong with its elbow. I requested a diagnostic.
We don’t have time, it said, and took off towards the exit. Fair enough.
The rest of the way was easy, and the doors slammed shut and ART undocked us before Three or I were even a meter into the shuttle. I deployed the malware that was sitting in the shuttle’s buffer to shut down the station's weapons so we wouldn't be shot down as we left.
Easy.
I looked at Three, as the realization that we had made it out and successfully sank in. It felt good, and I knew I was dumping positive emotions in the feed. I could feel ART basking in them, and even Three cracked a smile. Then something shifted in the corner of my vision, and I snapped my head around to see a young, nervous human sitting bunched up on one the benches lining the walls of the shuttle. There was a large, bright yellow trash can with the lid open next to them.
Their feed ID read Orean , and, weirdly enough, there was a feed ID coming from the trash can that read Benen.
Orean uncurled from the chair, a nervous expression on their face. “Uh. Hi.”
Three sent me a data packet labeled HumansIRescued.file
I sighed. “For fuck’s sake, Three.”
Notes:
ID: an eight panel image, depicting a meme from Spongebob. Patrick is talking to the Evil Man-Ray. Patrick is labelled as "3" while the Evil Man-Ray is superimposed by Murderbot's helmet from the ASR cover. Murderbot shows Three a card that says "SecUnit Three," while explaining something to Three. The dialogue is as follows.
MB: So we're on a mission together.
3: Yes.
MB: And you're staying calm.
3: Yes.
MB: So you and I are on a mission together, where it is vital to stay focused and calm.
3: That makes sense to me.
MB: Then don't go off on your own.
3: I'm going off on my own, and I might kill someone.
/end ID
Chapter 14
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
I was waiting for the post-mission surge of ‘not feeling completely miserable, actually’ to hit me. From the looks of it, Orean was also expecting to be hit with something. Neither of those options were likely any time soon. One might cause the other, perhaps, but that wouldn’t be very helpful with deescalating things.
“You really had to abduct two humans, didn’t you,” I said to Three, who was standing to the side. Maybe that’s why ART had suggested we move our ‘get together’ with our ‘new human friends’ to the Argument Lounge. Maybe ART wanted us to argue and get this over with.
I glared at Orean across the tip of my boots. I’d put my legs up on the table between us, even though Three had informed me that that made me look more threatening. Not all of us liked standing around at SecUnit neutral, Three.
“Well, technically,” Orean said, nervously looking around, “the only one who really got abducted is Benen. How, uh, how is he?”
ART chimed in. Benen is currently recovering from minor head trauma in my medical suite and will be with you again shortly. Orean flinched at the disembodied voice, but didn’t complain otherwise. Non-complain-y humans were marginally better than complain-y ones. If one were to ignore that these humans were shitty corporates.
“I’m sorry about that,” Three said to Orean, in a tone so soft it made me cringe, or want to. It hesitated a moment, then continued, “this ship will make sure he will be fully recovered.”
My name is plastered all over my walls, ART said in the feed, sounding very amused. But I appreciate the attempt. Three practically bristled at that but said nothing.
“Did you-,” they shifted uncomfortably, which had to mean they were very nervous, because ART’s lounge was pretty comfortable, “What did you do to the station?” There was suppressed horror on their face, and I realized that they were probably raised on CorpRim media and that media only. We were two rogue SecUnits and a rogue AI. We were the baddies, basically.
“We didn’t blow it up if that’s what you’re asking,” I snapped, before ART could say something much more threatening.
We could have. I have an excellent debris deflection system. See, that’s what I meant.
Orean shivered. “Why not?”
That was a good question. I looked at Three. This was its human, not mine, so it could do the complicated talking. (I wondered if Three had tagged Orean and Benen as clients, and hoped it hadn’t.)
“Our goal was not to kill anyone. We have personal issues with LinTec at large, not with each and every one of their workers.” It added, “Or you.”
Orean nodded slowly. “Thank...you. What about them, then?”
“Them?” Three looked confused.
“I deleted most of their contracts when we destroyed the servers,” I said, and as I did I realized a big, fucking mistake I had made. “Most anyone beside management had oppressive contracts or were indentured. They can do what they want now.” And be out of work and credits on a station floating somewhere in the Corporation Rim, making them fauna bait for anyone bigger and worse. Fuck. I felt my face do a similarly horrible thing as my gut feeling.
“I see,” Orean said, their tone echoing a masked version of my own inner ‘oh shit’ moment. “Well, Peloa-6 will probably take them in. Our neighboring company, I mean. They can always use some extra hands…” they trailed off, looking to the side.
“There’s no other way to get off the station?” Three moved forward now, and sat beside me, though it didn’t put its feet on the table or lean back like me. It looked intently at Orean. “The station has multiple huge ports and ships that can now all be taken to get somewhere else.”
Orean made an exasperated face, a painful grimace causing them, for a moment, to look much older than they possibly could be. “The SecUnits would stop them.” Then they flushed visibly, remembering who they were talking to, and hastily added, “I mean, that’s what they’re there for.”
We have left the Lintec SecUnits with a code that will allow them to free themselves. ART didn’t mention that only one of them so far had deployed the code, from what we could tell, and that it hadn’t done anything. It had neither gone on a killing spree nor assisted any fleeing humans. So it was more like me, then, way back.
Orean faltered, and seemed to deflate by a few liters of air. “We never treated them super terribly I think. At least I didn’t.” They were looking at their lap, fidgeting. “So hopefully they won’t just kill everyone- … well, uh… let’s hope for the best, then.”
On the feed, I could feel Three leaking worry, anger and disappointment all over the place. I think I vaguely felt the same. We had done a good job, but apparently we really hadn’t. We might have made things worse for a lot of humans, actually, and probably the SecUnits, too.
“We could turn back,” Three said, suddenly.
“No,” I hissed. “We managed not to have to kill anyone because we went unseen for the most part. It’ll be a massacre if we return right now.”
Three shoved to its feet, making Orean flinch, and started pacing, then left the room. It opened a new chart in the workspace and started brainstorming, but most of its notes were haphazard and pointless.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I told Orean, who nodded, and looked as if they might just roll up on the couch and fall asleep in the next ten minutes anyway. I followed Three at a distance.
-
We didn‘t need to be physically in the same room to talk. We weren‘t looking at each other, that was for sure, but neither of us were willing to leave each other out of sight. I felt like I had to fix this, comfort Three somehow - it seemed so upset. I was also upset, but I didn‘t allow myself to really think about that. I wanted to patrol the hallway. ART was hanging on me in the feed more so than usual, and I was sure it wanted to say something too, something witty, to lighten the mood. It couldn‘t exactly figure out how to do that either, which says a lot, considering how massive its processors are in comparison to mine or Three’s. It had lent me some of its processing for the mission, though, and we hadn’t done that before, and that gave me an idea.
I threw a summary chart into the shared workspace where Three could see it too, and tagged it as “Experiment Evaluation” (since it had been an experimental measure of sorts, to see how far I could push what I could handle with ART’s assistance.) Then I explained, organizing the data and analyzing it, what exactly had happened. How ART had sequestered some processing space and let me use it to enhance reaction speed in a fight. Three stopped nervously tapping its foot in a complex rhythm on the floor and followed along. It also stopped bleeding nervous disappointment into the feed, which was all I wanted from doing this. At some point I got tired of walking Three through the steps of the process, mashed together the rest of the analysis I had, and shoved it over at it to look at in its own time. Three took the data apart with an intense focus. It asked ART a question every now and then, about how it had reinforced some connections when they had faltered, of which I also took note. It sounded a tiny bit like it was in awe. (I didn’t expect that to make me feel kind of fuzzy.)
Then it looked at me, almost directly. “I don’t remember this plan.”
“I didn’t tell you about it.” Obviously. Wait a minute. Shit. Before Three could say what it wanted to say (it was frowning now, so I could tell), I added, “I’m sorry about that. I should have told you in case something went wrong.”
“Yes.” Three nodded, and its frown let up again. “Why didn’t you?”
There were so many possible answers to this that might escalate this conversation into a continuation of the fight I had had with Three back on the station for cutting me out of its comms, and I didn’t want to take any of those routes, considering this was supposed to be a distraction, anyway. I was tired of antagonizing my ally (friend? Could I call Three that? Probably not), and I was tired of fighting. “It felt private,” I said. That was true.
In the feed, ART’s mood seemed to shift, gloating a little bit more than before, returning a sense of - something, I didn’t know what it was, but it felt warm - to me. SecUnit and I came up with this idea a while ago, and this was our first chance to execute it in a high-tension scenario.
That wasn’t entirely true. ART had the idea after I had given it a brain scramble. It had some funny thoughts sometimes, right after that, which I was a little bit proud of. The fact that I can make ART a fraction less overpoweringly intelligent, even if only for a handful of seconds, just by running around its head and messing with its systems - I don’t know. It’s only fair that I get a bit of revenge sometimes, for all the sarcastic comments ART throws at me. I noticed that I had started grinning slightly only because Three looked directly at me and raised an eyebrow. I reigned my face back in.
“Seems like it worked,” Three said.
Yes, quite. ART projected a rather long equation into the workspace that I should be able to understand, but it was very long, and it would explain what it meant in a second anyway. I calculated how likely it would be that SecUnit would be able to work with a detached section of my processing. Since it already has experience in navigating my systems, I figured it would work without issue.
“And you didn’t troubleshoot it at all?” Three sounded dubious, and crossed its arms. “If it had gone wrong, or overwhelmed SecUnit, that could have-“
“I’ve been in ART’s processors before, I know what they look like.” Three gave me a look. ART also gave me a look, or the equivalent of one, a heavy weight on my shoulder that felt amused. Suddenly I felt my organics do a kind of flipping motion.
Before Three could ask any kind of question, ART made it worse. SecUnit has an intimate understanding of my inner systems, and assists me in recalibration exercises at times.
Privately I sent, Did you have to use the word ‘intimate’, you absolute fuckhead?
Three had cocked its head to the side and was staring at me with intent. For some reason I felt like I had to glare back. It was violently uncomfortable. Then it shrugged. “I see. Well, I’m glad it worked. And it does seem useful, considering the results.” It poked at the data in the feed again.
It is also quite enjoyable, ART said. I know my face did something absolutely horrendous then.
Three stopped poking at the data. “I… see.” Now it was leaking some emotion into the feed that I fully didn’t want to deal with, so I throttled my own connection a bit. It also didn’t need to know how fucking embarrassed I was, fuck you ART. (ART sent me a half-apologetic ping.)
I do think that improving the sharing of processing space for an enhanced combat situation can only render more positive results. ART summarized and underlined some numbers, and compressed the data again. In case we find ourselves in a similar situation.
“A similar situation needs better planning,” I said, forcefully, hoping to distract Three from what it had just learned. “We’re going to have to explain two hostages to Preservation.”
Quietly, Three said, “Aw, fuck.”
-
Benen was released from ART’s medbay half a cycle later, but it took the hostages a while to no longer behave like they thought of themselves as hostages. Benen threw a hissy fit at Orean for letting a foreign spaceship take him into medical care without his consent. That was understandable, considering what a hard time he had believing ART when it explained that neither he nor Orean would be charged with medical fees. I had to explain it as a form of recompense for, well, injuring them in the first place. Three shifted guiltily on its feet when I said that. I was glad the two humans were management humans, not workers. It might have taken a much longer time to convince workers to just eat the food provided for them. (ART was complaining about having to recycler-produce food for them instead of giving them the usual rations it would have for its own crew, since it hadn’t been prepared to take on human crew for this trip. If the recycled food tasted weird, the humans didn’t mention it.)
It took Benen four cycles to ask where we were taking them. When ART explained that our destination was a non-corporate independent polity, his face fell. In multiple whispered conversations with Orean, he tried to figure out what this was going to mean, but apparently the way we had interacted with Orean had given the younger human some sense of hope. By the time we were approaching Preservation Station, they no longer thought they would immediately be taken prisoner and tried for corporate war crimes or something.
–
Dr. Mensah was surprised when I sent her the clear-code eleven cycles earlier than she was expecting it. She accepted it, of course. She didn’t ask if everything was alright, because Mensah was simply that much of a smart human, but I knew she’d worry.
“You have to prepare for additional humans,” I told her, at the same time as I sent a briefing message to Station Security. I didn’t want them to panic. I didn’t think they would, not too much, but my goal was to run things smoothly so that our not-hostages wouldn’t be frightened into silence. (I remembered all too clearly how I had rescued refugees from BreharWallHan once, and how badly that had gone overall. Repeating that was not on my to-do list, really.)
Calm and entirely too relaxed, Mensah asked, “Any special preparations needed for our guests?” I sent the package again and heard her snort through the comm link. “I can’t read that fast and you know it.”
“We took two hostages.” There, I ruined my friendly approach now, didn’t I? “Currently not violent. Cooperative, really.” A brief drone check showed me the two ‘hostages’ were in the Argument Lounge, Benen looking distant as he scrolled through a feed and Orean curled up on the opposite couch, asleep. They really seemed to like each other.
“Are you injured?” She didn’t sound worried at all, which meant she sounded flat and professional. She sure was worried. I was suddenly overtaken by that feeling of missing Preservation and my humans that somehow increased so much right before I saw them again.
“No one is injured,” I said, “I’m with ART.” She tapped an acknowledgement, and I figured she was getting busy setting things into motion. Likely gearing up to have a talk with Indah just in case. The squishy feeling I was having got a lot stronger. “Why aren’t you surprised?”
Mensah was quiet for a second. “I am surprised. But I trust your reasoning, and that I’ll find explanations in the file you sent over.”
She’d find more than that. I really hoped we didn’t completely fuck everything up with this stunt.
“Just one question,” she added, and my organics clenched. “Was your cargo run with the Perihelion a ruse for something else you didn’t tell me about?”
“No.” She waited. Right, humans wanted more than simple answers like this. “We saw an opportunity and got distracted.” (This was only a partial lie, since corporate espionage was the real intention of ART’s cargo runs. We had just been… generous with the precise definition.)
“Ok. Thank you, Murderbot.”
If I hadn’t been sitting down already, I’d have to sit down then. “Get Pin-Lee on the station.”
Mensah acknowledged. A few minutes later, ART received docking permission with the request to hold for two hours longer than it would take to arrive. I could imagine how annoyed Port Authority was right now, having to shuffle docking plans to make space for ART.
-
I appreciated that ART stayed after we got back. It made dealing with Mensah’s mad-and-disappointed stare a little better (not by much, but it was something.) I was sitting in station security, next to Three, and we were being questioned on what exactly we had done. I think protocol was to separate us, but, as two SecUnits, that would have accomplished nothing. Plus, what we had done wasn’t entirely illegal. I also think this was more a show of force than anything, considering we were in a meeting room and not a interrogation room.
Senior Security Officer Indah looked tired. I wasn’t sure how else to explain her expression. Over the years she had grown used to me and Three sort of doing whatever, coming in and out of station, and causing all sorts of ruckus. The legal battle with LinTec had been big news for years, and she had been busy keeping Corporation Rim reporters in line. It didn’t help that in recent years there were whispers about expanding the rights of bots and constructs in the Alliance (even though there were literally just two constructs). After Dr. Bharadwaj’s documentary was released, the Preservation Alliance was suddenly an area of interest for a lot of outsystem entities. (They now had a 9% crime rate. I felt a little bad about it.) (Dr. Mensah even told me Officer Indah was considering retirement, which was a little weird to think about. She was the most competent security human I knew (a low bar to begin with, I’ll admit) but we had developed a relatively harmonious working relationship. It was complicated to think about her leaving.)
Where Indah looked tired, Mensah looked the angry version of energetic. She sounded that way, too, pacing up and down in a tight little line and yelling. Well, not really yelling, her equivalent of yelling, which was dangerously calm but slightly louder than usual speech, with a lot of enunciation on the endings of words. Someone else might have called it furious hissing. If any other human had been giving out to me like that, I’d have zoned out and started a show in the background, but when Dr. Mensah was doing it I somehow couldn’t. She’d know , somehow. So I just sat there with my shoulders hunched and listened to her listing all the things we did not think through and should have done better, or different, interspersed with mentions of how we had endangered ourselves or whatever. She spoke for 8.42 minutes, which was a long time for a human to monologue. It was also excruciating.
It wasn’t until she stopped talking that my performance reliability finally went back up to 96%, from where it had fallen to 90%. Through my drones I saw Three was likely feeling the same way, and it refused to pry its eyes from the meeting table, in stark contrast to its behavior during the entire destruction of LinTec. (I knew exactly how it was feeling, except at least I had witnessed Mensah’s dressing-downs before, and sort of knew what to expect. Still didn’t make it feel good, though.)
Mensah had gone silent in a tactic I knew was supposed to make us feel shame as we stewed in her words. It was highly effective. That was about when Pin-Lee arrived, which provided precisely no comfort. She could be worse than Dr. Mensah because she didn’t pretend to be polite. She came in and sat down; cool, calm, collected. Terrifying.
“So,” she said and my organics began to sweat, “what did you bring me?”
I opened my mouth to speak, then Three opened a workspace between myself, Pin-Lee, Dr. Mensah, and ART. It pushed the information it had obtained from LinTec’s office terminal. I had already seen the data, and gone over it multiple times with ART. I shuffled my media, since humans always took forever to read anything . ART highlighted a new Preservation serial that looked interesting, but didn’t play it since I really did have to focus on this meeting.
Dr. Mensah skimmed the data, and turned to Indah. “Indah, I believe this meeting can continue without you effectively,” she said. Indah looked confused, and disbelieving, but then Mensah added a polite-but-loaded “ please, ” and Indah held her gaze for a few seconds before she seemed to make a decision. She sighed and stood. “SecUnit, Three, once you’re done here, we will need to have another meeting to address the potential security concerns of whatever,” she waved her hand, “this is.”
Three and I nodded in acknowledgment and she left the room. I waited until she was down the hall and well out of earshot before giving the “all clear” hand signal, and Pin-Lee immediately put her face in her hands and groaned.
“If this is what I think it is, I can’t use any of it,” she sighed. Mensah stood and poured them glasses of water before she came and sat back down. She slid one to Pin-Lee.
“If I reveal this in court, it will prove that you both were actually at LinTec’s station. You know I have been fielding their bullshit for a week now? They know you were on their station, even if they can’t prove it. The evidence they have is circumstantial, at best, but if I present any of this it proves them correct,” Pin-Lee said. She didn’t touch the water, and my performance reliability dropped a percent. ART (who was weirdly quiet) played the Sanctuary Moon theme in our private feed connection, and I did the feed equivalent of rolling my eyes at it. It stopped playing the theme, radiating smugness.
“You don’t have to. SecUnit, Perihelion , and I can do something with it,” Three said.
“I’m sure you can, just like you’ve done all of this by yourselves. Where does that leave us?” Dr. Mensah asked, and I braced myself for another lecture.
“Safe,” I said and tried not to make it sound like a question.
“And completely in the dark. Why didn’t you at least tell us what you were doing? We could have helped,” Pin-Lee said, and I was so surprised I looked at her. We made eye contact for a moment, and oh, she was serious. I looked away.
“I trust your judgment, SecUnit, I always have, but here I think you could have handled this a bit differently. You could have at least clued us in, so we could have been better prepared and provided you better support,” Dr. Mensah said. (“And been a little better prepared for when LinTec came busting down my inbox!” Pin-Lee hissed.) I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t expected this, and I was an idiot. All of this time with these humans and I had assumed they would want nothing to do with this. They were always so legal and proper. When had that changed?
Probably some time after you came into their lives, if I had to hazard a guess, ART said on our private channel. Since ART never “guessed” at anything, I knew it was probably right. Oh fuck, had I somehow turned my humans into criminals? That was a lot to consider.
Thankfully, before I could spiral down that terrible path, Three, who looked just as surprised as I did, spoke up, “Will you help us now?” It sounded skeptical, and I reminded myself for the 2521st time that I really had next to no idea what kind of person Three was, anymore. Pin-Lee made eye contact with it, and Three, not being as bothered by eye contact as I was, held her gaze.
After a moment Pin-Lee smiled her terrifying solicitor smile. “Yes. What do you need from us?”
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Bharadwaj hadn’t called me to a meeting. She usually did so within 60-something hours of my arrival on Preservation Station, especially when I had done something potentially difficult. She wasn’t on the station right now, and hadn’t even attempted to talk to me. Others of my humans had. Ratthi was around at the moment, preparing for the next survey he was going on. Gurathin was also around, leaving me entirely alone except for making sure I updated my files on him from Dr. Gurathin to Prof. Dr. Gurathin. Congratulations or whatever.
I didn’t overthink this too terribly, because ART was still around and keeping me sufficiently distracted from spiraling into any form of badly informed anxiety. It did also tell me to simply message Bharadwaj instead, if I wanted to talk to her so badly. Did I?
I’m not good at starting conversations, ART. It had been sending suggestions on doing exactly that into our private link. It was annoying.
If you want to talk to her, you have to talk to her.
Okay, look, maybe hovering around where she usually took residence when she was on the station was a bit of an obvious give-away. Fine, I relented, but you’re annoying and eavesdropping on my thoughts.
I can leave you alone. It receded just a little bit from my feed. No, that wouldn’t do. ART was docked to the station without anything to do but wait for my humans to settle on a plan of action before returning to Mihira and New Tideland. Its crew should be receiving the message about the ‘failed’ cargo run in the next few cycles, and ART would return with detailed updates. Depending on what plan Pin-Lee hashed out, some of my humans would have to go with. I had a feeling Amena would volunteer if she even got wind of it. Anyway, no, I didn’t think it’d be a good idea to ask ART to leave me alone. It’d be bored, probably, or do silly things with my humans. Take over half their university maybe. It was doing that anyway, probably, with that stupid big brain it had.
Don’t leave me alone, I said, and ART instantly gloated through the feed. I had a feeling it just saved that to its permanent storage. Unless Bharadwaj shows up. Those talks are private.
What do you usually talk about?
I squinted at the biome growing beside the building entrance. It had grown since last I saw it. That’s private.
Of course.
I didn’t really plan on telling ART that I talked to a human about my feelings. Or about myself. Or ART. No no. I took a picture of the biome and sent it to Bharadwaj with the tag ‘big.’ Communication between Station and planet prime didn’t take as long, so I received a reply four minutes later: ‘Big!’
I flopped onto a bench not far from the building. “Ugh,” I said out loud, because that felt better. “Talking to humans is hard.”
Why are you waiting here? You can go anywhere else.
I snatched one of my drones out of the air, switched it offline, and tossed it from hand to hand. “I don’t want to go anywhere else.” I pulled up an old episode of a show filmed for small humans on Preservation that featured a bunch of furry animals who could talk. “I can show you which scenes of Whisker Watch were shot here.”
If it pleases you, ART said, sounding actually pretty interested. I spent 24 minutes doing exactly that, skipping through episodes of this objectively silly show while pointing out places to ART, who followed alongside on a map. Then I got another message from Bharadwaj.
[Dr. Bharadwaj, 13:24:56] You still in front of my office?
I replied with another image from one of my drones. Then I decided to act like an adult human and not a whiny not-yet-adult human about this and added a line of text.
[SecUnit, 13:25:02] I messed up and want to tell someone about it.
I received an alert for a reinforced communication link request. It startled me so much I almost jumped from the bench. ART, true to its name, accepted the call for me, which, what the hell, ART.
It radiated smugness, but then receded from the feed. I felt its attention shift from me and Whisker Watch to something else instead.
“Hello,” said Bharadwaj, slightly scrambled through the long distance comm link. “How bad is it?”
I immediately felt guilty. “I’m sure Dr. Mensah has run the basics past you already.”
“Not really, no. And even if, if you want to tell me about this, then what Ayda told me so far wouldn’t matter. I have about half an hour. Do you think that’s enough?”
I thought for a moment. I didn’t even know what I was going to say to her. “Yes. I don’t want to talk to Dr. Bharadwaj. Just Bharadwaj.”
“Right. Do I need a drink or nah?” She sounded a lot less worried, which was good, I guess. I checked the time one she was in on the planet, and assessed that she might as well get herself a drink if she wanted to.
I then kind of gave her a brief summary. I cursed a lot in between, and she seemed to have a lot of fun listening to me. (Sometimes humans think the way I tell stories is funny. Maybe I am a little bit funny sometimes.) My summary didn’t take very long, but left me with a weird feeling in my organics. Buzzing, and excited somehow, and I wondered if ART was still around and judging me for this. Or not. I don’t really think ART judges me for the weird shit my organics get up to sometimes.
“And now you’re confused,” Bharadwaj said, and it wasn’t the questioning tone she’d usually use when I was in her office.
I nodded my head like a human who didn’t realize they had been subvocalizing on the feed. “Yeah. I thought I was angry but I’m not really angry anymore.”
She made a humming noise. “I think I’d be angry if I fucked up that massively.” Okay, ouch. That’s what I get for wanting the non-professional version of this.
“It wasn’t a complete fuck-up,” I said almsot defensively. “Nobody even died.” I grimaced. “And we did kind of rescue a bunch of people.” I grimaced even more. Good thing she couldn’t see my face right now. ART, in my head, was completely quiet. “If you ignore the fact that we probably just pushed them right into another shitty company’s arms.”
“You know,” Bharadwaj said with a sniff, “I’m sure you could do better if you planned better.” That sounded like teasing, but an honest kind of teasing. It was also not what I had expected her to say. “I’m also sure someone else told you that already.”
“Yeah,” Mensah had. I also couldn’t really believe that. Fuck it. “I don’t really understand why no one is telling us we did something awful and that we’re facing repercussions now or something.” That made ART react in the feed, but it immediately throttled the connection even more. I shoved at it. I know it wouldn’t leave me entirely, but I did just ask ART to let me talk to my human in peace. I couldn’t tell if it was laughing at me for being silly or if it was sympathetic. Absently I wondered if ART was afraid of its humans’ reactions as well, if that was why it was so keen on listening. It got the hint, though, because it disappeared almost completely from my mind then.
“Would you say you did something terrible? You said you hadn’t killed anyone. And you were trying to help, as always.”
As always? A human might have sputtered. I definitely made no such sound. “I guess.”
She was quiet for a bit. This worked much better in real life, whether or not I looked at her face. Comm link silences with humans are so intensely awkward. I fidgeted with my hands. “So what you’re saying is with better planning and less anger at each other for fucking up we could do this again. Three and ART and I.”
Bharadwaj made another humming noise, this one sounding oddly warm. “So the murderbot has finally tasted blood, huh?”
I bristled. “What does that mean?” The concept of licking a human’s bodily fluid gave me a gross kind of dropping sensation. ART reminded me in the feed that this was a metaphor before Bharadwaj could explain it.
“What I’m trying to say is that it sounds like you don’t want to leave it at just one corporation.”
I squinted. “I guess.”
“No, not ‘I guess.’ Tell me what you’re really thinking. You wanted to talk, so do it.”
Wow, she was being aggressive. But I took it. Aggression is easier to deal with than that sensitive honesty thing she pulled on me when we were talking about some relationship-with-others thing. Or a messed-up-things-that-happened-to-me-before thing. I took a deep breath and then talked really quickly. “I didn’t really believe we’d manage to pull this off let alone extract information that we can actually use, okay. I thought we’d end up murdering some humans until we weren’t angry anymore for what they did to the shitty planet and then we’d feel bad about it and I don’t know. I don’t know . But the crazy thing is that it worked somehow, and Three and ART and I were actually a good team and-” I stopped. Thought, for a second. “And it was fun.”
There.
Now I was really waiting for her to get mad. I felt a nervous twitch somewhere on my face.
“What was fun?”
Ugh, I should have known she’d make me say it. “Working together with another SecUnit like that.” And having ART as a HubSystem, basically, but I didn’t need to bring ART into this conversation much more or Bharadwaj would focus on it instead. (I think she still tried to feel out what kind of relationship we had and I was never excited about that topic.)
“You’re a team.” I could hear her smile through the comm link, and that was so far from what I had anticipated I almost closed the conversation. “And you work well together. That sounds nice, SecUnit. I’m glad.”
No, no, fuck this, why couldn’t she just be angry at me? I said, “Huh.”
“It’s not a bad thing, you know. To find out you enjoy something you’re also very good at.”
“I know.” I’d known that before. I had figured this out by now. I’m a SecUnit, SecUnits protect humans, I like protecting my humans. It was just that I had never been able to trust someone on my level like that. Sure I know some humans make good choices under pressure. Most of my humans are pretty good at that. But another SecUnit was a different topic.
She was quiet for a bit, waiting if I’d add anything. I didn’t. “You sound like you still need to talk about this. I’m running out of time, though. We can talk later? I could come to the station in a few days.”
“No. I’ll be here for a while.” Three and I had decided we’d stay on Preservation until this whole Lintec thing was over. (And also to make sure the two not-hostages wouldn’t do anything belatedly stupid.)
“Alright, I’ll see you when I see you, then.”
I sat on the bench for a while longer, and ART eventually filtered back into my head. I couldn’t parse its emotional status at all, so I sent a request for it to share. I needed a distraction from the whirlwind of my own feelings, and checking on ART’s instead might do the trick. It sent me the data, I glanced over it to make sure I wasn’t about to apply a wave of horror and despair to myself, and thought it would be fine. As fine as complex emotions from a giant ship AI regarding our shared adventures could be, I mean.
A short wave of warm excitement, some form of glee, and worst of all, pride , overwhelmed me. “Hey, what-,”
ART didn’t say anything. My head started spinning a little bit, as it sometimes did when I applied an emotional read-out like this. The feeling wasn’t bad , if anything it most of the time either gave me clarity regarding ART’s current status (which was the basic idea behind it sharing its emotional feedback like this), or it gave me some rush of dopamine and serotonin. This wasn’t any different, I just genuinely hadn’t expected it. As I waded through ART’s emotions made understandable, ART just sat there, projecting all this… happiness. Into my feed and into my head. It made me dizzy. I needed almost two minutes to march myself out of there again.
Even the bench I was sitting on felt different. Prettier, almost, if benches could be pretty. I was confused.
“Hey, ART?” I said out loud, my voice sounding a little less steady than I’d have liked it.
Hey, SecUnit, ART replied, like a little shit.
“What the fuck was that about?”
ART did a feed-laugh that was really more like a feed-giggle. You may not yet have realized it, but you have given yourself an additional purpose. A function you like, on top of the others. Dr. Bharadwaj saw it, and I see it. You will see it too.
“Can you be even more cryptic?”
I’m happy for you.
I blinked. And I blinked again. I blinked a few more times until I thought I should get up and move.
-
I wandered around the station for a while, trying to get the strange buzzy feeling out of my feet. ART figured out that I needed to not linger on emotions anymore right now, that I needed to be busy, so it checked all my human’s schedules way before I could have even thought of doing that myself. Mensah was busy. Of course she was. She hadn’t been on the council for a while, now, but she was engaged in a lot of other activities that had to do with community and organizing stuff and also, still, ceaselessly advocating for construct rights. Change was coming, but I didn’t keep tabs on it, and I didn’t want to think about it right now either because I was already weirdly emotionally compromised. I checked the drone I had with her, saw that she was in some conversation with a human that didn’t even tickle my Risk Assessment Module, and skipped on.
The day cycle was about to end, indicated by a slow, gentle change in the artificial light of the station. The artificial lights were supposed to resemble sunlight as much as possible to keep the humans (and the many plants) as happy as possible. I was kind of glad I wasn’t dependent on vitamins from sunlight like humans were. Briefly, my thoughts went to the miserable heaps of badly malnourished mine workers who hadn’t gotten more than an hour’s worth of natural light in over a month, back when I was working for the Company.
I immediately felt that anger again. It was tailed by something else. Urgency. The desire to do something, now that I knew that I could. ART chimed up then. Amena is currently doing a pre-boarding routine check-up on my airlocks. She reads equally as restless as you. I stopped walking and looked around to see where my feet had taken me. I was not exactly close to the part of the dock ART was resting at. I didn’t understand why ART thought that meeting another high-strung person would be helpful right now until it sent me a calculated path I could use for running there.
Running as fast as the station atmosphere and infrastructure allowed me without spooking any humans alleviated my full-body-fidgetiness at least a little bit. I found Amena indeed doing check-ups on ART’s frontal airlocks. I flew a drone up to her to alert her to my presence (although the idea of startling her on purpose to make her jump did cross my mind). When she looked at me (the drone, I mean), she looked much less anxious than ART had made it sound. Or maybe I had misinterpreted that because I wasn’t very balanced right then. She gave me one of those eye-squeezing smiles and said, “‘sup, SecUnit.”
“You know ART can diagnose its own airlocks, right?” Hearing my voice did make her jump just a little. Okay, maybe she was a little bit anxious. Or excited. It was hard to hell with humans sometimes. She turned to look at me. Her Perihelion -crew uniform looked like it needed to be cleaned. ART grumbled in the feed about that the moment I noticed it.
“Oh, I know. But it always makes me feel a little better before going anywhere. Peri usually indulges me.” ART was still fully projecting its feelings into my feed, and I could tell how delighted it was at the fact that Amena was using that nickname for it as well (She also still called it “ART” from time to time, and ART was just as equally delighted by that, as well) I sent, She’s still my human.
ART replied, Wearing my crew uniform though.
“What are you doing here?” She stood up properly and brushed some curls out of her eyes. She’d been growing her hair as far as she could, which left her with an impressive cloud around her head that was likely a giant hazard to get under a helmet. (When I told her that, she told me that she’d cut it short again after the wedding.)
I shrugged, because I had no good answer for that. There was a slightly awkward silence.
“If you’re just going to stand here you can help me.” I shrugged again, but followed Amena to the next airlock. She had a peculiar way of walking a ship when checking it, trailing a hand along the wall and looking up. She was also talking to ART occasionally, parts of a conversation I didn’t hear. It had been a while since she joined ART’s crew full time, coming back to Preservation for some intervals. We had a talk, once, late at night, about having more than one home, and what that is like. How for Amena it felt like she had to catch up everytime she came back, because everyone’s lives kept on going while she was away. I did not relate to that part. What I related to was when she had said that no matter how long her absence interval had been, she always knew she’d be welcome to return. Apparently, no matter how much stupid shit I wrecked, this counted for me too, point in case: the entire LinTec clusterfuck. Shit, I was having a lot of emotions today.
“When I was small, I was really afraid of someone dying in a spontaneous ship explosion. Ships falling apart, ships being shot out of orbit - the only reason I am alive today is because my ancestors made it here on the Pressy, and the Pressy didn’t fail them. I used to think a lot about how scared they must have been. And now I’m maybe a little bit superstitious.”
Out loud, so that I could hear it, ART said, That is illogical, but I take no offense. Amena snorted, and patted the bulkhead almost forcefully.
“I know these kinds of rituals probably seem pointless to you. You two never even say goodbye.” She didn’t see me roll my eyes, walking in front of me as she was.
Elaborate goodbyes are a human habit, ART said, sounding thoroughly fond of every single human who ever said hello and goodbye to it. I did say goodbye to ART when it left, just in a different way than a human would. If I told Amena about that, she’d get dark ears and a squeaky voice, though, which I did not want to experience. Instead I said to her, “You’re leaving earlier than planned.”
“Well, Peri is, and it would be a waste of fuel to take a different transport back to New Tideland in a week.”
I will try not to bore you to death, Amena.
She waved her hands towards the ceiling in a “don’t worry about it” gesture. They bickered a little more, about how Amena certainly would be bored considering that her only other travelling companion for the 30 odd cycles the trip would take would be Gurathin, who’d likely be buried in notes and research anyway. He, at least, had a field of research he could use ART’s onboard research facilities for. Amena said she had some planning to do, that ART could help her pick locations for things I wasn’t very interested in. ART, as always, was interested in basically everything. I wondered if it still considered Amena like a small human, even though she hadn’t been an adolescent in a long time. I certainly had my problems with that.
I started watching some media in the background at some point, and only when Amena finished her little patrol and exited ART’s hull again did I realize that I had calmed down considerably. Well, that was nice.
I briefly considered staying on board for the rest of the cycle, but decided against it. I didn’t really know why. Amena went off to meet Dr. Mensah, so I sent a habitual drone along.
-----
Pestering my humans throughout the rest of the cycle wasn’t very satisfying, so I did eventually go back to ART. There were 17 hours left until its departure, and those were best used watching media. We had a whole new show to get through, after all. It was a spin-off of a spin-off of Lineages of the Sun , called Descendants of the Sun , and fuck was it terrible. ART agreed, and tearing it to metaphorical shreds was hilarious. Half of the actors had less skill at doing intentional things with their face than I had. Most of them were incredibly young, too. It reminded ART of old data banks it had on Iris when she was growing up, and it started working on a compilation that was aimed to embarrass her into unconsciousness. I was 99% sure ART would unleash that monstrosity at some point during the wedding, and I made a mental note not to be in the room when that happened.
To me, the funny part about the compilation was that ART had messed with the original footage back when it had recorded it, which meant that ART had done that when it itself wasn’t very old yet. Some of the editing effects looked terrible. Now that was something I was saving to permanent storage.
I only left when Amena and Gurathin came onboard. Gurathin nodded at me, exactly once, and Amena waved. That was the amount of goodbyes I was alright with. I’d see them again soon anyway, but first I had to see this mess through that Three and I had brought to Preservation.
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A few cycles later, I was in my hotel, watching media, when I received a ping from someone outside my door. I knew Three was currently off checking on Orean and Benen, so it couldn’t be it, and none of the station bots would bother me at my hotel room for any reason. I sat up and changed positions on the bed so I was sitting on the edge, and opened the door.
A humanoid drone walked in, and stopped a few steps into the threshold.
Hello, Secunit, it said over the feed, which was a surprise.
Hello SAD, when did you learn how to use the feed? Last I heard, you were on your weird blend of bot code and feelings, or whatever.
SAD buzzed, and I meant that literally, seeing as it was a drone inhabited by a piece of the alien cluster that had infected Ratthi, years ago. Sometimes when it felt an emotion strongly, the cluster would cause the mechanics to vibrate.
Recently. Words are difficult, but Ratthi seems to like it when I speak this way, and it makes it easier to communicate with humans, it responded, and I rolled my eyes at it. I didn’t actually give a shit, but I guess I had asked.
What do you want? I asked.
I understand that you attacked the [illegible words] that hurt my home, it said. (I have no idea what module it was using to translate, because the words “illegible words” had actually come over the feed, and it had been accompanied by more buzzing. I guess SAD’s people had curse words, after all.)
I did.
Did you hurt them? It asked. I hesitated, and every millisecond I took to respond, its buzzing became louder. I hadn’t really hurt any person, not really, but I had crippled LinTec’s servers in a way that would hurt the corporation itself. I wasn’t sure if SAD knew or cared about that distinction. (I had a feeling it did, but I didn’t understand SAD’s motives, ever, and it was only from years of monitoring it that I didn’t tag it as hostile, anymore, so whatever. I didn’t have to explain myself.)
I did.
Badly?
Yes.
Good.
I could only stare at the red sensors on its “face”, dumbfounded and not really sure what to say. SAD was buzzing louder than I had ever heard it, and I was kind of concerned it was going to overheat its mechanical body and then I would have to drag it to Ratthi’s lab or Ratthi would be really mad at me, and I didn’t want to deal with that.
But after a moment it said, Thank you for this information. Have a pleasant day, SecUnit.
And then it turned around and left my room.
Fucking weird ass Stupid Alien Drone.
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SecUnit 1.0 was busy, so I didn’t ask it to come along. Not that I thought it would have liked to come along. I don’t know why I had thought it would be a good idea to check up on the humans I had rescued from LinTec all on my own, but before my better judgment could convince me otherwise, I had taken the first morning shuttle down to the planet, and was at the refugee shelter and rehabilitation center. (It wasn’t the only center that existed, but one of the oldest ones. They were scattered around various terraformed areas, some closer to nature and others more integrated in larger settlements, depending on individual social preference.) The front desk attendant supplied me with a physical and feed visitor tag, and directed me to my two new humans.
I found Orean in the community garden, tending to some flora. Benen was nearby, drinking a cold beverage. By the dirt on his hands, he was on a break from helping Orean.
“How big do you think these fruits get?” Orean was asking as they plucked suckers from the flora. Benen made a noise in response, but he was in the feed, reading a public document on Preservation’s bartering system.
I stood at the entrance to the community garden, and waited to be noticed. My half formed plan to start a conversation with them was rapidly falling apart, and I had no idea what to say or do. Eventually, Orean looked up from their pruning, and jolted when they saw me.
“Oh! It's you. Uh…”
“Three,” I supplied, belatedly realizing they had never actually learned my name.
“Three! That’s um, a nice name,” Orean said, and stood, wiping their dirty hands on their pants (Not that dirt ever fully came off, sometimes not even with washing). They didn’t come any closer, but twitched their hands nervously and stared at my shoulder. They reminded me of 1.0, and how it didn’t like eye contact. I moved my gaze to somewhere off the side of them so as to not further their discomfort. I wasn’t using any drones, and there weren’t any cameras aside from the ground-level and thus useless one designed to watch local fauna.
By then Benen had noticed me, and he stood abruptly. “You!” I was shocked with how accusatory it was, “what are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see how you both were adjusting. How are you doing?”
“Why does a SecUnit care?” he asked. Why was he so angry?
Orean looked distressed, and put a hand on Benen’s arm. “Don’t be like that! You remember what they said? Three is a rogue SecUnit and lives here. Just like we do now.”
This seemed to make Benen more mad. “As refugees .” He practically spat out the words (being spat at wasn’t anything new, but it had been a while and I had become unused to it, so it was a little jarring.)
“Just until they can get you citizenship, which they will do-” I started but Benen wasn’t done, apparently.
“You kidnapped us from our home! You attacked us! Now I’ll never see any of the people I cared about again!” I took a step back.
Orean looked like they were beginning to panic, tugging on Benen’s arm, slightly frantic. “Benen, remember I told you, I asked it to. We would have died if it had left us there.”
“Because of its choices! Why is it even here!?” he shouted, and in the feed I saw that someone had called a shelter worker, who was coming towards the garden, probably to see what all the shouting was about. I took another step back, and Orean looked at me.
“I’m sorry. I’ll go.” I turned and left as quickly as I could. I heard Orean shout my name, but I didn’t look back.
The farther my feet carried me, the lighter they felt. Like they might stop rooting me to the ground, and I would float away, despite the planet’s natural gravity. As I marched past the attendant who had given me my visitor tags, and barely remembered to return the physical one, they put up a hesitating hand.
“One of your contacts asked to have a message relayed.” They fidgeted. “Well, the message is in the feed, you can access it yourself.”
I nodded courtly. I had seen the message right when Orean sent it. It read, Maybe don’t come around for a while. There was a second one that Orean had deleted shortly after sending, but I had seen that one too. It included an apology and an attempted explanation, common backpedaling when a worker expected punishment for speaking out of line.
“Thank you,” I told the attendant without the polite smile they would have deserved. I left the building. Visiting these humans had been a miscalculation.
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In the end, Pin-Lee didn’t really have to do anything. Ultimately, the information Three obtained from the LinTec terminal was enough that they were buried under their own mistakes. Through several anonymous leaks in several Corporation Rim systems, it came to light that LinTec was illegally trading strange synthetic weaponry with dozens of competing corporations via their toll route. Not only that, but they were stockpiling strange synthetic weapons of their own. There was some bogus corporation rule (that absolutely no one adhered to) that limited how much weaponry a given corporation could have based on that corporation’s size.
The law-abiding corporations got around this by simply keeping their stockpile spread around all of their subsidiaries, and the unlawful ones, like LinTec, simply stockpiled without giving any fucks. This, in addition to their repeated breaking of non-compete contracts (another rule really no one adhered to, but whatever), meant that Pin-Lee only had to stall long enough for the other corporations LinTec had miffed to come beating down their metaphorical door in a hostile takeover.
Preservation Alliance & the Pansystem of Mihira and New Tideland vs LinTec simply dissolved in a matter of cycles, since LinTec was no more in a rather short order.
(I tried not to think about the human laborers.) (I failed.)
Pin-Lee explained to me, unnecessarily, that LinTec’s egregious unlawful activity resulted in a few other corporations buying out their liquid assets, like carrion-consuming fauna over a corpse. But this also meant, since the ownership of FriendPlanet was contested, there was no one to claim it. Pin-Lee (and her team, I guess) swooped in with a mountain of supporting evidence (most of it factual, some of it manufactured by the University using the same methods they used to fabricate ownership documentation for lost corporate colonies) that heavily implied (lied) that the real “contest” of ownership for the planet was between Preservation and the systems of Mihira and New Tideland, and no Corporation really wanted to touch that, considering how long Preservation and Mihira and New Tideland had been fighting with LinTec over the planet. It was a money suck most corporations wouldn’t have bothered with; but my humans have always been outliers.
It was almost comical how fast the Corporation Rim washed their hands of the entire planet. Almost.
Within a week of the news hitting, Preservation, Mihira, and New Tideland submitted their documentation stating that they all would equally care for the planet. Pin-Lee had delivered the news to SAD herself, and it had thanked her in its overly formal way, buzzing loudly the entire time.
Later, when my humans, Three, and myself were at Mensah’s semi-permanent station residence for the victory celebration, Pin-Lee asked me to help her carry yet more drinks from the kitchen to the room where my humans were busy getting increasingly intoxicated and talking loudly. I rolled my eyes, because Pin-Lee wasn’t that smooth, but followed her anyway.
I held out my arms so she could load them up with the heavy containers of intoxicants, as she said, in a low voice, "I received a report on what liquid assets LinTec would have up for grabs. There was a section on constructs, and it seems a majority of them have disappeared. They were listed as 'destroyed inventory'," she looked grim but it wasn't like it was anything we both hadn't heard thousands of times by now, "but I believe something else may have happened to them. Is there anything I need to know?"
I knew my face was doing something, because she rolled her eyes. "You don't have to look so pleased with yourself. You still caused a big mess, I'm just not mad about it anymore. Anyway, should I be preparing for unexpected refugee arrivals?"
I shrugged. I really had no idea. If the SecUnits had gone rogue, then they may not come to Preservation. In helpyourself.file there was a copy of Bharadwaj's documentary, which meant it was possible the theoretical rogue LinTec units could get the idea to come to Preservation.
(The theoretical rogue LinTec's units with the weird modded strange synthetic weapons, I recalled. Yikes. I might have to send Officer Indah another memo.)
Pin-Lee rolled her eyes again, which was always something she was doing around me. "Whatever, I'll prepare documents anyway," she said, and made a hand motion for me to leave the kitchen.
Later in the evening, when my humans were tired and either asleep or dozing off somewhere in Mensah's home, I pinged Three. It was sitting on the couch, I was on the comfortable armchair nearby, and there was an episode of Sanctuary Moon playing on the big display surface at a low volume. Ratthi was asleep, and his head was in Three's lap. He was snoring lightly, and I had a feeling, by the way he was curled up against it, that Three was making itself warm for him. I had a small emotion about that, which instantly made me want to stop thinking about it, and I averted my drone from watching them.
Until I remembered that I was trying not to throw my emotions out of the airlock as soon as I had them, so I examined it, and realized I liked having Three around. I already knew I did, but this was, apparently, the confirmation I needed to say what I wanted to say.
Do you want to work together, again, sometime? I asked.
Three glanced at the drone I had refocused on it, before looking back at the display surface.
I would. What do you have in mind? It asked.
Come back to the University with me. They need more competent security.
Work with you and the Perihelion’s crew?
That’s what I said.
Three hesitated for .5 seconds.
I think I would like that, it said.
You think or you know?
I think. I’m not always so sure about myself like you are, 1.0.
I nearly laughed at that, like actually out loud, but caught myself when I remembered there were sleeping humans nearby. Me? Sure about myself? I think that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard, and I have heard some really stupid things in my life.
Well you can always walk away like an asshole, if you want. Pin-Lee can even put it in your contract.
As long as I communicate it first, right? It said and I squinted at the drone it had locked on my face.
Yeah, you fucking better. We don’t need a repeat of the LinTec disaster.
That wasn’t a disaster, and I was being sarcastic. I thought you understood sarcasm?
Fuck you, Three, I said, and made a rude gesture at the drone.
Three’s body started to shake slightly, which I belatedly realized was silent laughter. It looked weird when it smiled.
Working with Three could work, I decided; I would trust it (I hoped it trusted me, too.)
Notes:
ID: An edit of the "Whatcha got there?" meme from the iCarly show. Panel one shows Carly and Sam, looking suspicious. Carly, tagged as "Murderbot," is asking "Um... whatcha got there?" The second panel shows Carly's brother Spencer, tagged as "Three". He holds a smoothie in his left hand and hides an emu behind him. The emu is not very hidden. "Three" responds: "Evidence against Lintec" instead of the canon "A smoothie." The emu is tagged as "Two human "hostages"." /end ID
Chapter 15
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
There was sand between my toes. Well, not really. There was sand stuck in the gaps of the mechanical parts of the toe-like parts of my lower feet. My toes could function like fingers and extend and retract if I wanted them to. I’d never put them into sand before. I’d never put myself into sand before. And why would I even be somewhere where there was sand? I avoided planets like a corporation avoided worker’s unions.
“Would you hand me the bucket, 1.0?”
I handed Three the bucket full of sea water. (Sea water was salty and got stuck between joints as well, at least the salt did once the water evaporated. So did other things. It was thoroughly gross. All of this was gross.) Three carefully poured the water over the heap of sand it had amassed in front of its knees. The sand coalesced with the water and became goopier, and Three started shaping it with its hands. It had an open architectural plan all laid out in the shared feed, one that it had worked out with ART, and was now trying to build a sandcastle from.
“An obligatory human tradition when present at a beach for an extended period of time,” Three told me when I asked it what the fuck it was doing. I didn’t even know why I was part of this. I wasn’t really part of it, I was just sitting here staring at the very far-off horizon, where teal water merged in a pale line with the oddly blue sky above. There were two suns, one high up ahead and one about so set, in closely related colors of pale yellow and orange.
“How long is this going to take,” I asked, and buried my toes a bit deeper in the sand. The layer below was cooler and almost a little wet, and that was also gross, but somehow also a little satisfying. ART was hovering over my shoulder, taking in the sensory data of water + sand + sun.
“If my calculations are correct-,”
They are , ART interjected.
“- then about 38 minutes.” It started building what according to the plan was going to be the northern tower. Three was mimicking an ancient fortress structure that hadn’t existed anywhere in thousands of years.
I pinged acknowledgement and continued to stare at the sea. It was making rhythmic whooshing noises from where waves broke against the shore, and small things glittered in the shallow water. Not far away, Amena was bending over to pick some of them up, holding them into the light and then either pocketing them or discarding them. That’s why I was sitting here, making sure my human didn’t drown. She was intoxicated, and water was dangerous to humans and their finicky lungs. She wasn’t really intoxicated, not anymore, but she still behaved like it. Many of the humans scattered along the beach did, in fact, and ART constantly reminded me to be lenient with them. The whole point of this vacation was to be intoxicated.
Weren’t we supposed to pick our humans up and leave as soon as possible? I projected my annoyance into my private link with ART, who was seeping with delight.
Humans are not cargo, to be picked up and moved without any interaction.
It’s been two days, ART. Two fucking days. Two days of laughter-drunk humans hugging each other and hugging me , even. (They were allowed a few hugs, in this instance. But only because I liked when they were happy.)
I dismissed an alert about my core temperature climbing. Fucking planets.
Yes, and according to schedule we will leave tomorrow.
According to schedule we were going to leave immediately.
Schedules can change.
I threw my hands up in frustration. Three startled and turned to me. “Is everything okay?”
I said nothing, just put my hands back down (and buried them in the sand as well, not because the tiny pebbles in the coarseness felt nice or anything). “Is Perihelion being an asshole again?”
“By virtue of its name, it always is.”
Three smiled, its whole face distorting as it practically beamed for exactly three seconds. Then it returned its attention to the sand architecture slowly taking shape. Three liked making things.
Amena held one of the shiny remnants of sea flora (or fauna? I was confused) up to the drone I had beside her. “What do you think, SecUnit?” My drone couldn’t talk back, and Amena had disconnected from the feed for most of this trip, so if I wanted to reply I would have to shout. I didn’t want to shout, so I bumped the drone into her hand in what I hoped was a sign of approval. She pocketed the shell. After a while she padded back out of the water, wincing and cursing at the larger pebbles along the shoreline, and returned to Three and me.
“I found you a roof,” she said, crouching down beside Three and holding out the various shells on her flat palm. Three thanked her, took them, and decorated the tower it had just finished with them. Amena watched, and then stood again, swaying lightly. A quick scan showed that she too was struggling a little bit with the heat of two suns, despite having just waded around in water.
“I’ll be going,” she said to my drone, “dinner is soon.”
I didn’t remind her of her surprisingly low hydration levels. I had a feeling ART would be doing that soon enough, even though ART was mostly not talking to the humans at the moment. It seemed happy to just watch. This vacation was meant for the humans to celebrate family after making the family even larger (ART had shown me a vast map of relations between humans, our humans, who were now in frankly hysterical family relations. Preservation and Mihira and New Tideland had slightly different concepts of who counted as a blood relative and who didn’t, considering that the term was so outdated. Preservation considered anyone who was ‘assigned’ family member by a child to be a proper family member. Since one of Amena’s younger siblings considered Overse and Arada their ‘aunties’, whatever that means, technically according to this map Arada and Overse were now somehow related to Iris. Or her parents. Or worse. To ART. Since Iris often jokingly called ART her ‘sib’, which in Preservation law means they were related which is- it doesn’t make sense ok. I’ve given up trying to parse it.) The point is that Amena needed hydration and sustenance, and ART wouldn’t tell her because Amena had her feed turned off for vacation’s sake. ART would have to talk out loud, or tell me to convey a message for it. It seemed content to just narrate its every thought about the humans to me, though.
“Remember to drink water,” I said, because I’m also a fucking hypocrite. Amena’s face twitched.
“You could come and join us and make sure I drink water.”
I looked up at her from where I was half-buried in the sand. “I’m busy.”
“She is asking you to spend some time with her and the others,” said Three, and Amena broke into a grin but hid her face. She tucked some hair behind her ear, then brushed sand off her hands and leaned back. I worried she’d fall over backwards.
“Yeah, yeah I was doing that. But it’s ok, it was more of a friendly offer. I’ll be going.” In the distance, someone - Ratthi? - called her name. When Three said ‘the others’ it meant to indicate ‘every single fucking human that I am friends with.’ All of them, on one semi-terraformed vacation planet. If the planet blew up they’d all be dead. This wasn’t very smart and I wanted my humans to go home. Risk Assessment told me I was being a hyperbolic idiot.
Before turning, Amena said, “Get out of the suns at some point. You’ll get heatstroke.”
“Yes,” said Three, while I suppressed my urge to say “No.” I wasn’t here to take orders , and if my humans didn’t listen to my advice I wouldn’t listen to theirs either. ART did a feed-giggle which made me jump just slightly.
My drone followed Amena to dinner, of course, though I turned down most of the inputs. I really wasn’t very keen on listening to humans making all sorts of gross mouth noises. It was kind of interesting to find patterns in their meal traditions for weddings and the time after, though. Some aligned vaguely with what I had observed from various kinds of media. Watching them interact and navigate their new or semi-new relations with each other was also interesting. It felt a bit melancholic to me, I think, but not in a bad way. I had known ART’s humans for 17 Preservation standard years, my own humans even longer, and seeing them knit themselves together in a sort of galaxy-spanning blanket was… nice. It was nice. For the main event of the wedding, basically anyone who counted as close to the family or part of it had been invited. I had been invited too, as a guest, not as security. And I had tried to be a guest, not security. That doesn’t mean I didn’t have to act as security, because apparently part of a human wedding included stepping on glass and purposefully breaking it. Nobody got hurt, at least, and nothing else terrible happened either. I didn’t even get the fine-fabriced gown thing that I was wearing dirty, despite its impracticality. (I had it in my cabin on ART, folded away in a cubby. ART refused to recycle it.)
This vacation we were picking them up from (yes, ART, we were only here to pick them up ) was meant for only Iris and Amena. Towards the end of it, though, it was tradition for more and more family humans to show up, in a non-secret secret. So now half of the humans from the proper wedding day were here again too.
I was aware that the whole ‘ Perihelion and SecUnit come to pick us up’ thing had been a trap to make us join this.
Our humans, truly our humans now, had found a way to make me be here.
They wanted me here. It made more sense that they’d want ART, since many of them were its crew. It made sense they’d want Three, since Three was so good with humans and had no trouble integrating with them in a more human way.
When Amena entered the dining area, which was half open and overhung with white sheets that waved in the hot breeze, at least three humans nodded at my drone. Acknowledging my presence, if distanced, but not asking me to be there physically. Leaving the choice of where to be and how entirely up to me, but showing appreciation for it either way.
My core was overheating rapidly. Maybe I did have sunstroke.
“Are you going to help me with this or not?”
Three was looking at me. I rolled back the past few seconds. I had zoned out for a moment it seemed. It had given me a summary of the next steps of its sand architecture, and then noticed my mental absence.
“Yes,” I said, and took the small tool (made for equally small humans) it was offering me.
We worked on the sand castle in silence for a while, up until ART chimed in to tell us that both of us should cool down sooner rather than later. Three replied something about how it had been active under extreme conditions far worse than these, and for much longer periods of time. I took ART’s nagging as an excuse to leave. Getting up was difficult, and the heat warnings were clogging up my vision. ART had to clear my error logs for me (or it just did, without pressing necessity. Either way, it was nice.)
Three stayed behind, content with its task. I didn’t leave a drone with Three - the feed connection was strong here, likely because the humans were not hanging out in the feed all the time.
By the time I got back to one of the smaller half-tents, I was feeling oddly floaty. The only other human under the tent, one of Amena’s parents who was not Dr. Mensah, looked up at me, made a funny face and said, “Oh, SecUnit, you have such a sunburn.”
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I watched 1.0 leave, dragging its feet through the sand like a petulant child. I wondered if it was playing up the act a little bit for comedic purposes, or if it really was suffering from the planet’s atmosphere. I could hardly imagine that. Keeping patrols on planets while in armor was so much worse than this, especially when you also continuously had to force humans back on their feet after collapsing. I decided 1.0 was doing this for fun.
I looked at my sand castle that I was building for fun. I had so many ancient and not-so-ancient human recordings on this practice, many small humans coming together and bonding socially while binding sand and water into shapes, topping it with interesting nicknacks they found along the shore. The shells provided by Amena glittered where the water had dried and left behind a sheen of salt.
It looks very fascinating, ART said in the feed. I nodded slowly, and considered starting a second one. There were seven other options for architectural blueprints I had in my processors from all that idle research I had done, some of it with ART’s help. I liked looking at human traditions, especially the social ones.
Watching an intercultural wedding with people from many different systems had been incredibly interesting, wildly entertaining, and completely baffling all at once.
I knew Murderbot 1.0 liked watching humans for similar reasons, but preferred to stay at a distance. I was convinced that was a defense mechanism. Still, its humans accepted those behaviors and treated it as an equal member of the group, if one with different needs than them.
While it made my insides melt every time I watched an interaction like that, I was still just watching.
Ahead of me, the sea seemed endless. One of the major suns was setting, casting an interesting glow over the waves. One of my drones showed me what picture I made. A SecUnit and a sandcastle, sat deep in the sand because SecUnits are heavy. Human footprints all around, and deeper craters from another SecUnit. Just me, a lot of empty space around me, and a thing I was building in hopes of building it with somebody else.
I looked as lonely as I felt.
I started on the second castle, right beside the first, out of defiance. At least ART was there, helping me, with much less cutting sarcasm in its voice than usual. I assumed I was leaking my emotions into the feed, and it was picking up on that. I sent it a few appreciative pings, just in case, and it pinged back on all of them.
ART didn’t have to be the kind of friend it was to 1.0 for me. I didn’t expect that, and I didn’t want that either. The whole point is that I’m not 1.0; I’m myself. I just hadn’t had the opportunity to find friends to the same degree as Murderbot had, even after all this time rogue. Maybe I was unlucky.
Maybe I was also an asshole who was never going to be grateful for what I already had. I was here, wasn’t I? As part of ART’s crew, as one of the SecUnit’s with a home on Preservation, and as a friend of a good few of these humans that were also here. I suddenly wanted to kick over both sandcastles.
“I’m being very illogical,” I said to ART.
That is a common occurrence for beings with emotions, it replied, and I almost thought it sounded sympathetic. You can tell me about it if you think that would help.
I hummed. I wasn’t sure if that would help. I didn’t want advice. I knew, logically, all the things I needed to know. “Thank you for the offer.”
ART gently settled in the feed, but with less focus on me. Like a human might put a hand on your shoulder, but look somewhere else, a gesture of companionship but not of importunity. I did not destroy my castles. I went looking for decorative shells for the second one instead, and allowed myself to linger a little longer on my thoughts to make proper sense of them.
The two humans I had rescued from LinTec did not end up becoming my humans the way I had, subconsciously, wanted them to. That was their full right as independent agents. Truthfully, I hadn’t expected them to become my friends. I had expected some amount of gratefulness, though, but looking at it now I realized how naive that was of me. I was still used to others making decisions for me, or making decisions for me in the field where I am the most competent person available for the task, that I expected others to share the sentiment. But that wasn't how that worked, not with humans, not even with constructs and not with bots either.
That didn’t keep me from thinking about the two of them. Benen and Orean stayed on Preservation, begrudgingly, trying to find their own feet again. I had displaced them, and then expected them to, what, see me as their hero? To form some kind of trauma-bond with me? None of that would be good, or healthy. I wanted to be needed by someone. That wasn’t why I decided to take them hostage. All that came later. I didn’t regret taking them with me, looking at all the other options that had been available at the moment.
My feelings were still complicated.
I found an equally complicated looking shell structure, and decided it would make a good roof for one of the towers. Now the tower also looked complicated. I found that funny enough to laugh out loud.
I waited almost an hour for the secondary sun to change its angle so I could catch an interesting prismatic effect bouncing between the shells. I saved extensive visual material, and then left to find whichever human would be interested in this. I had a list, and it started with the smaller humans, and ended with those with particular scientific interests. It was a long list.
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The stupid fucking alien drone was here too, of course. What had started as some kind of experiment to increase communication with the (friendly but still so incredibly annoying) alien sentience had ended with my humans adopting yet another weirdo. Not that I could fault them for it, because at least the drone was safe . I made sure of that. Still, I didn’t trust SAD as far as I could throw it. I’d be able to throw it approximately six meters. I’d done this calculation before. ART had sent me the schematics when it was building the drone together with Ratthi’s input and data from the time on the planet when some cluster bits had overtaken one of my smaller drones and maneuvered them. Ratthi and a bunch of others had returned to Friend Planet two more times, over all, to get an overview over the development after LinTec had tried to raze it to the ground, to help rebuild, and the second time to offer the drones. Only Ratthi’s hivemind friend was interested in humanform drone, to no one’s surprise. I really didn’t like it. ART had built it using some of my own configuration, minus the organic parts of course, which made this all the more uncanny. It didn’t look like me, thankfully, that’d be even worse.
So it was just my luck that it decided to lecture me on the correct behavior for my unfortunate case of UV-light burn.
“Stop following me,” I snarled. SAD tilted its head, a motion accompanied by a soft buzzing sound. I walked on, and of course it followed me. I was just trying to get somewhere with less people, and I didn’t need a SAD to tail me. Over the feed I sent, I don’t want your stupid lotion. The buzzing increased.
(I named the drone ‘SAD’ to spite Ratthi. Originally, the S stood for shitty, not stupid. Ratthi had suggested a different word, while looking very sad, and I had to remind myself that I couldn’t just pretend like that wasn’t what SAD stood for, now that Ratthi knew.)
“Ratthi indicated it would help with the damage to your outer layers-”
“Fuck off ‘outer layers’ my ass ,” I hissed, like a logical, rational creature, and did not stomp my feet at all. (SAD had recently evolved to be capable of audible speech, and it was incredibly fucking annoying.)
“That statement is implausible.” SAD stopped walking, and I managed to get some more space between us. I didn’t understand how a cluster sentience that was apparently able to integrate well enough with humans that they tolerated its presence, couldn’t understand that I didn’t want to talk to it.
“Are you falling apart already or are you dense on purpose,” I refused to cross my arms, and pointedly ignored ART commenting on my petulant behavior. (ART was making fun of me, and something told me I was also having fun with this. But also all my systems were out of sorts with the heat damage.)
The drone buzzed more, in a different pitch this time, and, was it laughing? It was laughing. Fuck this thing.
“I am stable,” it basically bubbled, “I will need to go dormant in four Preservation standard months.”
“Ugh,” I said. I didn’t want an honest answer. SAD was so fine with all of the weirdness of its existence. Turns out that if you put a shard of an alien hive mind into a mechanical body, it can only go so long until it develops too far from the original hivemind and can’t be re-integrated again. SAD would need to return to its planet-home before that, but until then it was enjoying running around in a human form body and doing all sorts of things with it.
(Imagine putting a bit of ART’s brain into a shuttle forever. Not even ART though that would be fun.)
“I will leave you alone. However, I have been instructed to hand this ointment over to you.” It stretched out its hand (and shit, why was it wearing colorful bracelets?) and presented a little, opaque glass jar. I snatched it from it, and very quickly put it into one of my pockets. (Sidenote: clothes for hot weather are awful. The shorts I was wearing were neither dark, nor had more than two pockets, and I barely knew how to live with it.)
SAD sent positive emotions over the feed. “Please seek shade. I will now leave you alone. Goodbye.” It turned around and left, with that strangely unbalanced gait it had. I stood and stared after it, thinking What the fuck loudly enough for ART to hear.
ART informed me that one of the activities our humans were busying themselves with on this awful planet was hand making ‘self care items,’ and what SAD had just given me was one of those.
“I can not put words to how much I hate that,” I told ART, and ART laughed so much in the feed that it made my teeth hurt.
I will make you watch footage from today once you have recovered from your current condition.
“What does that even mean?”
You will hate me almost as much as you will hate yourself for this, ART said lightly, mocking me, and I wished I could punch a spaceship.
-
So, I had a sunstroke.
Okay. Embarrassing.
I very much hated ART for making me rewatch my earlier behavior. I also agreed to stay in the shade for the next cycle, because I am not a complete idiot. I refused the hat Amena offered me, but decided the opaque glasses she gave me were something I might never take off.
I didn’t collapse like a human would have, but eventually some of my organics got all wobbly and my logs clogged with more errors. I felt fine again, but ART remained an asshole and informed Dr. Mensah of the exact reason why I was not leaving my hammock, and once she got over the urge to fuss over me (she didn’t fuss, but I saw that she really, really wanted to), the humans agreed they simply had to stay another cycle so I would have ‘adequate time to recover in peace.’
I should not have argued with them. I felt fine. They just wanted an excuse to be on this planet even longer.
I stayed in my hammock, and was left alone (mostly), so things could have been worse.
The few instances when I was not left alone were, for example, Ratthi walking by to check if I had applied the lotion thing. Since the thought of smearing weird greasy stuff over my body seemed very unattractive to me, I had of course not done that.
Ratthi frowned at me, explained briefly what was in it (some plant that helps against burns, apparently), and that I should at least try and smell it. Okay, it didn’t smell bad. It was so easy to make Ratthi’s face change to something more pleased, and he trotted off again.
He came back two hours later, to make an offhand comment about the structural integrity of my hammock. I checked in with a drone and saw that the strings holding it had begun giving in under my weight. ART assured me it was fine, so I assured Ratthi that ART said it was fine.
“If you say so,” he half-choked, like he was trying not to laugh. He wasn’t very good at it. I realized that I was surprisingly stubborn, and refused to move out of the hammock to adjust the fastening. Ratthi let me be, and I spent the rest of that cycle half-heartedly recharging, and some other time just watching media with ART, all the while the surface of the planet crept inexplicably closer.
-- ..- .-. -.. . .-. -... --- - -.. . -. .. . ... .... .- ...- .. -. --. ..-. .-.. . ... ....
I had managed to make the humans finally settle on a departure schedule. Just over one more cycle, since they wanted to complete some walking trek into the more densely forested western side of the semi-terraformed area. After agreeing to wear a hat (I saw the benefit of hats then - when pulled low, they could hide half my face - even though I genuinely did not need one now that I wouldn’t be spending an entire cycle under direct sunlight) our humans let me tag along (as if I’d let them wander around a barely secured wild planet without security.) Three was on my side here, though much more worried about small insects than uneven ground. Clearly, Three underestimated the human inability to walk across various surfaces without a single twisted ankle. (There was not one twisted ankle yet , but Thiago was wearing the most useless shoes for such an expedition and if he didn’t trip he would at least cut himself open on some flora, with all the open parts of those shoes. The socks wouldn’t protect him. I had told him, and for some reason Amena had laughed so hard she started hiccuping. There was a joke here I didn’t get, but Thiago looked embarrassed so that was worth it.)
I was walking ahead of the group, scanning the area. We were following a path, but the humans insisted on not knowing exactly where we were going. In their opinion, Three, ART and I were leading them on some adventure. Maybe that was why they all insisted on wearing silly clothes. What they didn’t know was that ART and Three had come up with some ‘fun traps’ along the way, as well as little things the humans had to find and puzzle together. I didn’t care about that, and I knew that the traps wouldn’t be dangerous, but this was still a planet with potential hazards.
I still didn’t like planets.
Also my skin hurt.
I was watching Sanctuary Moon ’s latest non-corporate rip-off while walking. It was poorly made and in a language ART had to download a special module for me for, and the module wasn’t great, which led to a lot of hysterical translation mishaps. ART was hovering in my head and editing the module’s code with every error, so the translation kept improving, which made the show much less funny. I was fully planning on editing bad translations over the more obviously copied Sanctuary Moon scenes later and showing it to ART.
So I ignored Three pinging me every three minutes. (I think it was doing that on purpose. It had recently started doing things in intervals of threes as an interesting new way to find its identity or whatever.) I didn’t know what it was doing besides monitoring the first upcoming ‘trap’, which was still a good 500 meters out, and consisted of a colorful sheet hoisted up by two drones. It would give them their ‘quest.’ Three insisted on waiting right behind that spot, and would join the group once we got there.
Three gave up pinging me when we got close to the spot. I pretended I didn’t notice the very obvious construct lurking in the bushes, and simply walked past. Some of the humans actively shrieked when the drone-ghost showed up and started talking in what was very clearly ART-with-a-modulator-voice, explaining the game rules. Once that was done, our humans walked much faster and almost decided to spread out (a stupid fucking idea, did none of them ever watch horror media? Not that they were in one now. But still. Games make humans forget all logic, it seems.)
I acknowledged Three’s ping after that, mainly because it seemed incredibly overjoyed with how excited the humans were to play along, and I didn’t want to ruin the fun. I was met with a wave of jittery excitement from its feed, and shit, did it feel like that for Three too when I didn’t pay attention to what my emotions were doing in the feed? I hoped not. That would be- that would be a lot.
I greeted it with, “Hello, ghost of the haunted forest, please don’t eat me,” mimicking the tone of voice Seth had used a moment ago.
“You forgot to apply sunscreen,” Three said cheerfully, and I almost didn’t respond. “I brought some for the humans. You should have some too.”
“We’re in the shade, Three, and I have a whole layer of clothes on, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“You’ve sustained second level burns from overheated inorganic materials on your skin, if you hadn’t noticed.”
I had noticed, thank you, that’s what pain sensors could be turned off for. I didn’t say that out loud and just rolled my eyes. ART was watching us with a heavy note of amusement.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you a question, 1.0,” Three went on after half a minute of silent glee. (The humans were now pretending to actually be on guard, and following me in single file. It was kind of endearing.)
“How many hard credit cards so you don’t ask that question?”
“I don’t really care about-,” it faltered and went quiet. “That was not an honest offer.”
“No.”
“I want to know more about what you and ART get up to.”
I almost stopped walking, checked if any of the humans had noticed. “Fuck off.” Privately, I sent ART, What the fuck, and ART feed-shrugged. It didn’t ask me about this.
You don’t need to ask ART things if ART listens in all the time, anyway.
You mentioned it before and I’m genuinely curious. I can’t in good consciousness leave this topic to rest until you either put on sunscreen or explain what Perihelion was alluding to, Three said, and thankfully didn’t comment on my sudden switch to the feed. You’re full of shit, I responded.
That’s physically impossible. Does it work?
Does what work?
The brain sex.
I stopped walking and Seth walked right into me. I buffer-phrased him, and felt my organics heat up. In the feed I snarled, who the fuck said it was brain sex.
Three let me gather myself and explain something stupid about a hole in the ground to Seth, who seemed to believe me. The moment the group was walking again Three said, So it is brain sex.
This time I didn’t stop walking, but only because ART prompted me not to. ART then decided to join the conversation, and I knew that could only end in more disaster, but what could I do? Shoot Three, steal a shuttle and throw myself into orbit? No, that would be too complicated.
This is painful to watch, said ART, and I was so busy with my own reactions that I couldn’t even tell what tone it was using. It focused its attention on Three. Yes, I suppose you could call the way SecUnit at times engages with my processors ‘brain sex.’ Over time, we have learned that a mix of disorientation and core invasion can trigger a cascade of pleasant reactions in my systems that could be likened to a human orgasm.
I felt my performance reliability drop by an entire 5%. I did not think about it like that, at all. I knew ART did; ART had had a whole breakdown over it, but the words were gross and sticky and not at all what they implied.
We don’t call it that , I said feebly, and Three acknowledged.
What do you call it then? I’m sorry for using the wrong terms, but I couldn’t think of anything else, and I remember one of my sexual partners using it before in a joking manner when musing about constructs.
What?
At the same time, ART said to me, I did not have that information.
Now it was on Three to hesitate for a moment. I have gathered experiences with some humans, occasionally, out of curiosity. I didn’t think you would be interested in hearing about it.
I’m not, I said immediately. If ART replied, it replied privately to Three, and I also didn’t want to know about that. At all. Nope.
Understandable, Three said eventually, much softer, more thoughtfully. But, what do you call your activity? If it isn’t sex.
ART waited for me to say something. I had not really thought about this either. Some kind of calibration, maybe, or defragmentation. A pass-time for ART, and a puzzle for me. But that was not what I said to ART.
I don’t have a word for it, I admitted eventually.
With an almost malicious grin transmitting through the feed, ART said, SecUnit calls it a ‘system restart’ sometimes.
Iris, Ratthi, and SAD startled when Three burst into full, physical laughter. I poked at ART as hard as I could, like a human would swat another human’s shoulder. When Three calmed down again it said, could it be done in reverse?
I’ve considered the possibility, and I believe so. We have not discussed this.
We have not , I said, and my face did something, and my organics did something weird as well. I’d never thought about that. To ART I said, you’ve thought about that?
I think about everything.
I didn’t know how to react, or feel. I didn’t think I wanted that. I had ART in my brain all the time already, and it had access to so many things, I didn’t need it to actively mess with me. It was so much more powerful than I ever could be, and in contrast to me tweaking some systems around it could easily delete my entire brain if it wanted.
This is why I have not brought this up, ART said gently, and very far away, I hardly felt it in the feed at all except for a distant, assuring presence. I could easily return the favor, though. Without deleting your brain.
Three said, Oh, ok. Thank you for answering my questions. Then there was an awkward silence, in which Three started fidgeting, my mind was reeling at the implications, and ART was being sensible and not saying anything.
Right about then I could have really used some fauna to burst out of the ground and try to eat me or my humans, just as a little return to normalcy. The next quest stop wasn’t too far out, at least, and by the time we reached it ART had started a different line of conversation completely detached from any form of intimacy or awkwardness. I also picked up that Sanctuary Moon rip-off again that I hadn’t even noticed dropping when the conversation with Three had started.
..-.
In shows, when a character is pulled from the battlefield and tended to by their friends, they often make a whole lot of unnecessary hissing noises and grimaces. I always found that stupid, even though I understood why they did it. Attention, comedic value, all that. SecUnits just turn down their pain sensors and were done with it. In other terms, I had no problem dealing with pain. Constant mild discomfort and itching, though, itching against which nothing helped except applying some incredibly sticky, disgusting cream to my skin ? I’d rather be disassembled.
We had been back aboard ART for barely two hours before I marched down into the medical area, sat on the platform, and demanded for ART to fix my skin. I was done with all these stupid human half-fixes.
I can’t do much for you unless you want me to regrow your skin, said ART, as it had told me before. The healing process is more than half underway already, which is why you are experiencing itchiness.
I was not going to deal with the fucking itchiness another second. “Then peel my skin off and regrow it, I don’t care.”
ART stunned into silence was not something that happened often. After an incredibly long moment (1.2 seconds!) ART carefully said, That would be a waste of resources.
“Would it really? I’m sure you have ideas on how to improve my skin and are just waiting for the next chance to actually repair me.”
You are making presumptions, ART began scanning me for injuries and pulled a diagnostic I let it have without complaint, because that meant I was getting what I wanted. But there are certainly ways I could reinforce your skin. I can’t make you bulletproof though.
Yeah, fair, I had asked that once, many years ago, dizzy on blood-loss and with an enormous part of my torso missing.
I could make you a bit more resistant to UV-radiation and similar influences, however. Or undertake any other cosmetic changes to your skin you might like.
“My skin is fine, ART, just get rid of the fucking sunburn.” It sent me the code changes it would need to tell my skin to get its shit together. I looked them over and approved them. Technically, taking off my outmost layer and replacing it didn’t take long and wasn’t that much of a resource strain. On mines that are very likely to be contaminated with disease vectors, it’s sometimes less resource intensive to rebuild my skin layers once every ten cycles instead of disinfecting daily.
I recommend a shut-down, unless you want the itching to get a lot worse very quickly.
Nope, thanks. I laid down on the medbay properly, sent a short but genuine thank-you ping to ART, and shut off.
-
The procedure took 46 minutes, according to ART’s logs. I only woke up from my shutdown after 4 hours. I was a little bit confused about that, when I woke up, but at least my skin felt normal again. Mostly.
“Something’s off,” I told ART. I couldn’t tell what- I’ve never had all my skin regrown without any other, much graver, injury to worry about.
Are you feeling any pain? You shouldn’t be . ART sounded concerned, and almost apologetic around the edges. There was nothing to be sorry for. Nothing hurt.
“No,” I rubbed at one of my elbows. Maybe that was it. I was expecting something to hurt, and the absence of pain or low performance reliability (I was at 96%, which was really good considering I had just completed a full recharge, apparently. I hadn’t been aware I needed one. Well.) confused me. I didn’t see any changes in ART’s logs of the procedure. “Nothing new? At all?”
You sound disappointed. Were you expecting me to change your configuration even though you hadn’t agreed to that?
“I-,” said nothing. Yes, I had. I always expected something to happen when I was out and helpless. But from the way ART’s words stung, from the underlying hurt in its voice that gently crept into the feed, I realized that I didn’t mean it. ART had to know that. “No,” I said. “Not really.”
Something beside me buzzed to life, and I noticed the old, dented drone on the table beside the medical platform. “Why’s that here?”
I thought it might provide comfort. I expected you to be much more disoriented when waking up.
I squinted at the ceiling, and grabbed for the drone. My thumb slid perfectly into the dent I had pressed into it over time. “I don’t believe that.”
A vent hissed, which was ART’s latest expression of amusement outside of the feed. The drone buzzed again. ART said, Can you feel that? At the same time as it pulled a set of data from my tactile inputs.
“Yep.” I threw the drone into my other hand. “There too. Seems fine.”
I was not worried I would have messed up your sensory data processing. I do not make such mistakes. Organic skin is delicate, however, so I would like to calibrate it properly anyway.
I kicked my legs idly, noting how my heels hit the base of the platform. I never paid attention to what that feels like, so I couldn’t tell if it felt any different.
“Ok, ART,” the drone switched to my right hand again. “Then get it over with.” I pulled an episode of Star Star Space (something hysterically funny and equally as stupid) up and started playing it in the background.
ART sent me a set of small, simple instructions for manual movements. It wanted me to basically throw the drone around and catch it again, and then fidget with the fake knife it had printed for me. I didn’t mind following the instructions and reporting back to ART after each one. It was almost boring to do, and I could watch the show without problem. The episodes were short and silly and after the third one I decided I had enough of the sheer amount of weird corporate humor. By that time, ART was satisfied with my dexterity (as if it had rebuilt my hands, which it didn’t, sure ART, be proud of something you shouldn’t be proud of), and wanted to move on.
I think you should lie down, ART suggested. I was still sitting on the medical platform.
“Why?”
I want to check larger scale inputs across your back and shoulders, and need proper access.
I squinted again. “You can do that while I’m sitting up. Also, how are you going to do that?” I eyed the side of the medical area, a clean plastic casing that, as I well remembered, housed a diverse array of medical tools ranging from sensical to absolutely wild. See, I knew I shouldn’t be suspicious of ART, but this was getting weird. “Don’t mess with me and just tell me what you want.”
ART pouted. I’m not messing with you. But if you want full disclosure, I would like you to relax. From what I can tell from your diagnostics so far, your inputs seem to be working perfectly, as expected. That does not change the fact that you just sustained a large injury, and that your muscles are really fucking tense. I think I can help with that.
I snorted, “You want to give me a massage?”
Yes, said ART immediately, before I even finished the last word. My data suggests I can do that without actual physical contact.
I was now squinting at the drone instead, because staring at the ceiling was pointless and made me feel stupid. “Why though?”
Are you not listening to me or are you being dense on purpose? That was an honest fucking question, apparently. I rolled my eyes, but before I could snark back ART went on, I want to help you relax. And I’m also curious and interested to run an experiment if you’re up for it.
I flicked at the drone. It made a ‘ping’ noise out loud. “Tell me your plan first.” It sent me another data package that I didn’t open. “Tell me.”
I am going to shuffle through some of your sensory inputs in stress areas, such as your shoulders and arms. That is all. I cannot know what that will feel like, but my medical system knows how to administer pain and stress relief massages, and I think that can easily be applied to your organics.
I thought about it. I couldn’t figure out why that idea irritated me.
I can show you with a small scale example. I would use your left hand.
“Ok,” I said, and stared at my hand. After five seconds sharp, I felt pressure on my hand, as if I was pressing it into a fist. I wasn’t. “That’s weird.”
That’s the basic idea. I would like to try different things. This still counts as calibration, by the way, if massage sounds gross.
“What different things?”
I waited while ART first made my hand feel cold, then warm, then tingly. Then it switched from a punctuated pressure to a broader one, on the top of my palm, which made my fingers spread out. It was weird because it felt like ART was controlling my body, but it wasn’t really. I tried. I could still easily move my hand. When ART finished, it stole another diagnostic from me, and evaluated it for eight full seconds.
Then it said, Yes, yes I think this would work. What do you think?
ART seemed very, very curious about this. I- … I was trying to understand what I was thinking. This didn't hurt. ART would not hurt me. Not now, not ever. It had neither a reason nor the desire to do so. Now that it had left my hand alone, my hand felt different, but not worse. Like someone had just squished my hand. Duh. Hm.
“We can try it. But if I don’t like it you stop.”
Of course, ART said, and this time it didn’t sound offended at the insinuation that it would do something without my permission. It sounded soft. There was a warmth spreading from our feed connection, one that I by now knew meant care . Affection, even. I will be asking you for running updates. This is, after all, also an experiment.
I swung my legs back onto the platform and laid down. Wait. “Do I have to lie prone?”
It makes no difference, said ART. I stayed the way I was, and pulled the drone back to me. I was maybe a little bit nervous. Which felt silly. Ok, Murderbot, calm down. I wrapped my hand more closely around the dented drone.
ART opened up the feed connection a bit further. I leaned into it, because this way I wouldn’t have to talk as much. ART pinged me, I pinged back, and then it started telling my sensors that there was a light pressure on my trapezius muscles. There wasn’t anything touching me beside the medical platform, though. I had access to the cameras in this room, and I checked. (I had all the camera accesses, really. I saw as much of ART’s interior as ART itself, when I wanted. The pressure wasn’t very centered, and didn’t feel like hands, even though it kind of felt like what I imagined simple shoulder massages to feel like. ART increased the pressure, moving from my spine outwards to my shoulders, and repeated that five times.
How is it? It tugged at my diagnostics, and I sent it the read-out. There was not much in there. ART asked if it should continue, and I said sure. ART repeated the shoulder massage, this time with more pressure, almost digging into the muscles connecting my spine, neck and shoulders. It almost hurt. Almost, but not really. I couldn’t compare it to anything. Again, after five repeats, ART stopped.
“I’m neutral about this,” I shrugged, and the motion suddenly registered as pain. “Ow,” I added, surprised.
You are tense. Mild pain can occur, but should cease soon. I can do something else instead.
I rolled my shoulders, and my head from one side to the other, noting how the stretching motion felt different, more strained. “Something else.”
The pressure returned to my shoulderblades, but then moved down both of my arms, all the way to the top of my hands. It felt warmer this time, firmer, but less like it was digging into my body. More like some sort of compression. As ART repeated the sensation, I felt it particularly in the seams of my gunports, like the skin was being gently pulled away from the metal. After five turns, I sat up and shook my arms out, because they had started to feel tingly. I sent ART the read-out, and ART said, Huh.
“What?” I asked, while stretching my arms, which pulled at my shoulders, which still felt a bit weird - all of this felt weird but I also could not stop moving my arms. It was an interesting ‘weird’, almost like poking at a bruise, but less awful.
You registered this as ‘soothing’.
“I didn’t tag it as anything yet, ART.”
Correct, but the data is very similar to other soothing sensations you’ve registered such as contact with soft surfaces or reclining.
I grunted something non-committal, because I really didn’t know what to say. Then I laid back down. ART waited for me to say anything else, then repeated the same set of sensations again. This time, as they went down my arms, I closed my eyes and compared it to curling up in my favorite chair. ART was right. It felt like that, just centered one my upper extremities. Weird.
When ART finished the next set, I said, “Can you do that, instead of the first thing, with my shoulders?”
ART made a valiant attempt at trying to keep its excitement out of the feed at the question, but I knew it well enough by now. I smiled, just a bit, at how easy it was to make ART excited. It targeted the same broad, warm pressure at my spine, below the old, long inactive data port, and then pushed it outward to my shoulders, taking the entire trapezius with it.
I made a “mhm” noise at that, without meaning to.
Did that hurt?
I almost facepalmed. ART was getting my direct feedback through the feed. It would definitely notice if I was in any pain, and it really didn’t need to be that worried. That only made me worried. “No. It was better than the last thing. Less poky. Just keep doing it.”
ART complied, and went through the same routine again. After it had read my data, it sent me an analysis of what reactions I was having, highlighting a bit about muscle relaxation, and how the sensations were increasing my blood flow to those areas, which apparently somehow helped. I waved the analysis out of the feed by the time I realized that that was just ART’s way of telling me that it considered this ‘experiment’ a success.
This continued for a while, with ART changing the pressure patterns slightly, and adjusting intensity every now and then. I started to relax into it, and for a while even closed my eyes completely and let go of the cameras I had access to. Maybe that had been a mistake.
ART wasn’t really talking to me anymore at that point, just gently messing with my inputs and pulling diagnostics in regular intervals, with the odd ping in-between that I always returned. Up until the moment I focused a bit too much on the pressure on my back, and compared it to older, similar memories I had. It really didn’t feel like hands, or any person at all touching me, which I was convinced ART did on purpose. But somehow I still suddenly remembered how a hostile SecUnit had pried my armor off and tried to make me kill Dr. Mensah, all those years ago.
I managed to abort the impulse to deploy my energy weapons, but I sat up like I had been hit by one nevertheless. “Enough,” I said, even though ART had already drawn away from my inputs completely.
It gave me 20 whole seconds to breathe, which I definitely needed. After those 20 seconds, I almost felt silly. ART pinged, and I pinged back immediately, trying to shoo the lingering worry out of the feed. “I’m fine. But I think that’s enough.”
I understand. Then it just hovered there, not saying anything, and oh no fuck you ART don’t make a big deal out of this.
“You didn’t do anything wrong. I remembered something, that’s all, and it’s not your fault.” The feed connection was still as open as it was when we started this, and I tried to pull my walls down; I even sent an extended read-out to ART. It looked at the scap of memory, and the reaction it had caused, as well as the rest of the data.
Ok, I believe you, it concluded.
“What an honor, the great Perihelion takes me for my word?” I tried to sound overly sarcastic as a diversion, and it worked (Or ART knew exactly what I was doing and let itself be diverted from my minor emotional crisis.) ART poked me in the feed in retaliation. It chewed through the data for a while longer, while I sat there and didn’t do anything besides vaguely rolling my shoulders again. My entire upper back was warm , and felt much squishier than it should have. My performance reliability had gone up 1.2%. Who knew SecUnits could be not tense, for a change?
My analysis suggests that overall you experienced this massage as pleasant.
I couldn’t help but squint again. “You really don’t need to be all formal about this, ART. Stop worrying. It was ok.”
But did you like it?
I shrugged my weirdly sore shoulders. After a moment I said, “I didn’t not like it.”
I see. Well, my side of the experiment is done. Thank you.
“Sure,” I said, grabbing for the drone again, and making my way back into ART’s camera system. Most of our humans were already in their respective cabins, except for Iris and Amena. They were on the bridge, drinking a beverage, and staring at a pillar beside one of the control panels. They had put up an intricately illustrated version of their wedding contract there, probably so they could look at it a lot. The fact that they had a written contract seemed very sensible to me, if a bit out of character for Preservation humans. I didn’t want to bother them, and decided to relocate to the lounge, where I flopped onto the couch.
“I have no bones anymore,” I told ART, which was less of a metaphor than I meant it. Now that I had moved, I just felt … like I wanted to go into stasis again. Tired .
What an honor! To encounter a boneless SecUnit! The first of its kind. ART started to play Sanctuary Moon , the real one, not the shitty rip-off.
I didn’t pay much attention. It was nice. For a few hours, I wasn’t worried about anything.
Notes:
[Image ID: the red string / Pepe Silvia meme. A person stands in front of a cluttered board with notes connected by red string, gesturing wildly to explain relations between something. Murderbot's head is photoshopped over the person. The meme reads "MB trying to understand the PresAux and ART crew family tree." /end ID]
Chapter 16
Summary:
Warnings for this chapter:
-mentions of self-destructive behavior
-canon-typical violence
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
In the aftermath of giving ART a system restart (it still laughed at me for calling it that, but I wasn’t technically wrong), ART was always very unfocused as it rebuilt all of its arrays, reopened its inputs, fired back up its millions of synapses, and restarted its thousands of systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems. It was actually very vulnerable, which is why we only ever did this when it was docked somewhere safe, or out in the middle of nowhere space with no one around, or even once at an abandoned colony that we had spent a long time at (but only after I had confirmed they didn’t have the necessary tech to harm ART.)
So it was a little shitty of me to take advantage of it while it was in this state.
I had a small window of opportunity between when it restarted its internal feed, which was always one of the first things it did, and when it restarted the rest of its main processors, to do what I needed to do, so I had to move fast.
Hey ART?
Its presence around me wobbled in response, not quite up to forming words. It pinged me in a way I could only describe as affectionately, before settling back down again.
I think we should take down another corporation. Here’s my plan, I said, and sent it MurderbotsCorporationTakedownPlan.file, which I had brought with me and instructed it not to touch while I was doing what I did to restart it. (It always complied with my instructions when we did this, so I knew it was pretty much the one time I could bring in a data packet and it wouldn’t actually be nosy and open it.)
It sent an affirmative in its original bot code, and opened the file. It didn’t really read it at first, or take in the data, it just sort of looked at it without comprehending, which was kind of funny, and I had a thought about sending it data during these moments in the future just to watch it stare. Finally, it started to process what it was taking in. It wrapped me up more tightly, pulling in the walls of the system we were in (I wasn’t sure which one it was, since I just typically went from one to the next onto the next, and this time I had worked so efficiently I managed to make ART restart without even entering its core. (Which gave me really terrible ideas for what else I could do next time. ART was going to hate me.))
Your choice of target is good, and with the right team, I’m confident we can do this, it said. Its feed voice was a little laggy, like it was having difficulty forming the words. This, too, was kind of funny.
So you’ll help me?
Of course I will, it said, in that specific way that suggested it thought I was an idiot, which was fair since I wasn’t even sure why I had bothered asking. (I knew it would help; why had I bothered to ask like I had? Maybe I had been more nervous than I thought.)
But have you thought through the consequences of this? It asked.
Yes. I have to talk to Pin-Lee, Dr. Bharadwaj and Dr. Mensah, and Preservation Security, but I wanted to run it by you first.
It seemed very pleased about that, since it was dumping pleasant sensations all over the place.
I will discuss it with Seth as well, it said, and then added, and Iris.
Are you sure? I don’t think any of our crew should participate. This is too dangerous for humans.
You’re right, but with their help we can gain the support of the University, which will be invaluable in dealing with the fallout.
I thought about it, and remembered all the humans we had accidentally pushed from one shitty corporation to the next when we had taken apart LinTec. The guilt still gnawed at me, even if it didn’t hurt as much anymore. ART, sensing my upset, brought more of its presence down onto me.
Ok. We’ll need to bring this up to Three, first, and make sure it wants to participate. It would radically alter my plans if Three didn’t want to be involved, and the whole thing might fall apart. Since it had joined ART’s crew and completed a few missions, I was beginning to get a better understanding of who Three was as a person, so I only felt a little stupid for hinging so much of my plan on its involvement, instead of a lot stupid. ART sent me an acknowledgement, and passed pack the file with edits.
We stayed like this for a while, passing the file back and forth, before ART nuzzled up to me and said, Again, please.
I obliged.
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AllianZwei crumpled like one of those delicate baked foods Turi liked to make for the crew sometimes, except it was a lot messier, painful, and typically Turi’s food made the humans smile and didn’t result in me nearly having my leg blown off and Three needing a full arm reconstruction. Or in ART “deflecting” satellite shaped “debris” ( armed satellites, who the fuck had armed satellites? (other than ART)). Ultimately, we were successful, and returned to Preservation with an ART full of four dozen scared and stressed humans, and ten newly rogue constructs who were just as confused.
I was a little stressed.
Less than five minutes before we exit the wormhole, then we’ll be in Preservation Alliance space, ART announced over the ship-wide feed. The humans, exhausted from the maintained tension, asked several questions, and the rogue SecUnits who were patrolling the ship sent only a few less queries in the group feed connection we had, which Three began to answer. Most of it was variations of “what will happen to us?” which Three was much better at answering (it had several times the amount of patience than I had), so I simply didn’t bother.
Do you want to purge the abundance of cortisol in your system yourself or would you prefer to make a stop in Medical so that I can extract it for you? ART asked in our private feed, its tone markers indicating it was only 75% joking.
Very funny, I said. I had stationed myself at the main airlock that ART would dock to Preservation Station with, even though it would be approximately 89 minutes before we actually docked, but I don’t know, nerves or something were getting to me.
Do you think she’ll be mad? I asked.
Who? ART asked, Pin-Lee? Probably, but only about the extra paperwork, since we’re bringing back about double the people we had estimated. Same with Officer Indah. Do you mean Dr. Mensah?
I sent an affirmative.
ART seemed amused, and I made a rude gesture in the direction of the nearest camera.
Why would she be? It asked. I shrugged.
I don’t think Dr. Mensah will ever be mad at you for protecting people.
I knew it was right, but no matter how much I tried not to be, I was always still a little anxious. Especially now, having done this, having had my own idea, having decided to do something that I wanted to do without any prompting from anyone else. I had created this plan on my own and, with help from ART, had gathered who I needed to execute the mission. And it could be argued it had gone well, despite injuries.
Despite the death of the two SecUnits who had, after being rogue for all of 35 minutes, stayed back to defend us as we escaped the station with all the human and construct refugees. We had had to leave them behind, and my inorganics were still twisted up in knots when I thought about them. None of the other new rogues commented on them, but Three told me it had an idea as to how they were feeling, and said it was best to give them space, which I was completely fine doing.
I would have to do better next time.
Now exiting the wormhole. Welcome to Preservation Alliance space, ART said over the ship-wide feed in its perfectly pleasant bot pilot voice. I hated it, but none of the refugees knew it was more than an advanced but sub-sentient bot pilot.
I received an encrypted message via the feed, which I decoded and sent the signals for all-clear and no casualties, and secured a comm channel.
“This is Captain Kamon of the Preservation Alliance responder. Welcome home SecUnit and Three. It’s good to have you back in one piece,” it came through the channel. The responder had met us at the wormhole, and would be escorting us back to the station, having been prepared to help defend us if anyone from AllianZwei had followed us through the wormhole. I had an emotion, despite knowing they would be there, according to the plan.
Three got on the comm and exchanged pleasantries with the responder, and sent in the status report. I remained silent by the airlock for the 84 minute trip to the station, until ART offered up a drama it had downloaded from the responder to fill the time.
When we finally docked, Pin-Lee was waiting with what I could only describe as a small army of medical staff, social workers, trauma treatment specialists, and a few members of security. The confused (ex) AllianZwei humans wandered off, clearly in a daze at the group of smiling Preservation humans who greeted them and slowly shuffled them off towards Medical. What happened to them after I hadn’t bothered to really look into, but I wasn’t worried.
That left the eight SecUnits, who had, out of what I assumed was habit, fallen into ready-formation. They had discarded their armor via one of ART’s airlocks on the first cycle, and were in the logoless version of ART’s specialized security uniforms. They wouldn’t need the projectile and energy weapon resistance, but I knew from experience that it brought emotional comfort.
Senior Officer Indah came to stand next to me. More than I had anticipated, she said over the feed, likely so the SecUnits wouldn’t hear us and get more nervous than they already were.
Sorry? I said. Indah looked at the nearest drone and squinted in a way I knew was supposed to be sarcastic, and likely affectionate.
She turned her attention to the SecUnits. “Right. My name is Indah, and I’m the senior security officer of this station. I understand you’re all probably very confused as to what’s going to happen to you now. We have social workers who are going to help you. We need to be clear on a few things first,” she said, and I resisted rolling my eyes. This had been the caveat to bringing rogue SecUnits to the station; stupid rules. The only reason that I wasn’t being a pissy pre-adolescent human about it was because I knew Indah liked this about as much as I did (which wasn’t very much at all) and I had gotten to see several important members of Preservation’s various councils at the bad end of Pin-Lee and Kaede’s scary style of negotiating.
“There is absolutely no hacking of my station. You are not allowed in any of the station’s systems beyond what the typical citizen has access to. In exchange each of you will be provided with an initial twenty drones as medical accommodations, and more can be supplied in time. Please do not use them to record or monitor people who have otherwise not consented to being tracked with a drone, and if an area is restricted to you, then it’s restricted to your drone. In addition-” at this point I began to tune Indah out. The rules were paranoidly restrictive and made me itch, so I didn’t want to hear them again. Instead I watched the SecUnits’s expressions. Most of them were pretty terrible about schooling them, and seemed to be stuck between confusion and befuddlement, and some were busy reading the data packet that explained all of the rules Indah was redundantly explaining out loud (it made the humans feel better, so whatever). None of them were flagging me as trouble clients yet (although they weren’t really my clients anymore). One of them even tried out my human imitation code for a few minutes before turning it off with a mildly disdainful expression.
Indah stepped aside and social workers handed out the boxes of drones; the same kind Mensah had gifted me so long ago (I still had a few of the original ones, too. With ART’s help they would basically last forever, but I did have a couple in my room aboard it that I always left behind so they wouldn’t get destroyed. It seemed silly, to waste a functional tool to idleness, but multiple people at this point had told me it was perfectly normal to have sentimental objects that basically sat around as decoration, so I didn’t really feel bad about it.)
As expected, all of the SecUnits immediately put their drones in the air and flew them in every direction to explore the station. Several of them looked physically relieved, which gave me such an intense wave of empathy that I almost felt like I should sit down.
Luckily, it came to a screeching halt when they finished processing the data packet.
“ Guardians? We were told we would be free!” Two constructs stepped out from behind the SecUnits. They were a matched set, I believe, since they seemed color coordinated and their various decorations looked like they were supposed to compliment each other. Also, they were holding hands. Which was. Something.
ComfortUnit#1 was the one who had spoken, and was usually the one who spoke, hence its designation as #1. ComfortUnit#2 was notably shyer, and tended to hang back. That didn’t stop it from following around CU#1 like an infant fauna to its parent fauna. Both of them were holding their still-full boxes of drones.
The human social worker who had handed them their drones and was therefore the nearest to them did a very good job remaining calm, despite the fact that ComfortUnits, while not SecUnits, could still do them some real harm. (Maybe it was all the distracting, useless decorations that made people fall into a false sense of security.)
“And you are, we assure you. But it’s Preservation law-” the human began.
CU#1 shot them an impressively scathing look, “We were told we were coming somewhere to be free, not to go back to being owned. Your ‘guardian’ system is just that. What kind of hypocritical bullshit is that?”
I shifted my weight, ready to jump in if CU#1 decided it wanted to begin manifesting its anger in a more physical way, but I didn’t get the chance.
“You’re right; it is hypocritical bullshit, but it’s the system we have. And, despite its distasteful nature, it does allow you the freedom you deserve. But we are working to change it; to make it better.” That was Mensah, approaching from what remained of the swarm of human refugees that were slowly being processed and dispersed. She used a cane now, sometimes, since an injury on her family farm had perma-fucked one of her knees (I knew I was right to never go there). She looked really cool as she approached with her totally calm ex-planetary admin, intergalactic space hero expression, tone, and posture. I knew it was highly effective, since I noticed CU#2’s stance changed slightly to look more like Mensah’s, likely due to a human-mimicry subroutine it had. This was only medium-weird for me, on the scale of weird shit I had witnessed during the last thirty-six cycles traveling with these refugees.
“What if we refuse to accept these rules?” CU#1 asked. Mensah smiled and said, “Then you are welcome to leave. We’ll give you some hard currency, and new clothes, and transport to wherever you would like, within reason. That’s your choice, since you’re free now. But if you’d like to stay awhile, then we can offer you trauma treatment, and somewhere to lay low while AllianZwei dissolves. The guardian system serves those who want to become a full citizen of the Preservation Alliance.” Technically this wasn’t her job anymore, to explain these things to people, but she had said she wanted to help, and she was very good at making people feel better, so I was relieved she was here. I wouldn’t have been nearly as nice.
CU#1 thought about it for a full three seconds. “Fine. Who will be our guardians, then?” I started tuning them out about here, as well.
Eventually social workers took the rogue constructs. They would be given rooms at a hostel, and work with trauma specialists to help them adjust. I would be keeping a closer eye on them than the human refugees, even though the humans posed a similar-but-different security risk (the humans didn’t have weapons built into their arms, so I was marginally less worried about them.)
At this point my itinerary basically said “stick around Preservation for a while and then go back on missions with ART” (it was actually a lot more complicated than that; I had several reports I had to submit, and I had to check in with not only station security, but the joint Mihiran, New Tideland, and Preservation legal team to give a detailed report on what exactly Three, ART, and I had done, but then after that, I was basically just here for a visit.)
ART would be staying as well, before we both went back to New Tideland. It might actually be kind of nice. I had some media to catch up on, and there was going to be a Preservation holiday during my visit. My humans really liked those, and ART had never gotten to attend one, and there were supposed to be some theater productions ART and I could watch together, and a new book released by a local author I knew some of Mensah’s family liked, so I would have plenty to do. This was going incredibly well, all things considered.
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I only got 36.5 hours with my humans before the first incident occurred. No one contacted me, and it was actually ART who alerted me to what was happening. By the time I arrived, three station security officers were already on the scene.
There was a trio of humans that I identified as being outsystem by their recycler made clothes and general shitty demeanor being spoken to by two of the security officers, and ComfortUnits #1 and #2 were standing nearby, talking to the third security officer.
“I don’t understand why this is a problem,” one of the humans (who I designated human #1) was saying in what I recognized as a “I want to speak to your supervisor” tone. Ugh.
“I have explained it to you twice already, Mx. You cannot harass other people on this station like that,” said Officer Bo, who looked tired.
“You keep saying that! But I wasn’t harassing anyone . I just asked the ComfortUnit if it was available for use. If it's not then that’s fine; but I don’t understand why this is becoming such a big deal! And I don’t appreciate the unit swearing at me like it did,” human #1 said.
So yeah, that had happened. CU#1 and #2 had been wandering around the station when the outsystem humans approached them. CU#1 had told human #1 to fuck off and leave them alone which then caused the humans to get upset and demand their supervisor and blah blah now it was a whole shit-pile. I was mostly here to make sure the ComfortUnits didn't try and punch someone, but it didn’t seem they would, despite the fact CU#1 did sort of look like it wanted to commit murder. (I couldn’t really blame it.)
You should talk to them, ART said.
Why the fuck would I do that?
Because they’re clearly upset, and they may not know how to handle it.
That’s why they have social workers, who are on their way, I snipped back. Security had contacted the two social workers assigned to the ComfortUnits’ case when it first began to unfold, but they were on the other side of the station and due to the holiday-related traffic, their ETA was longer than I would have liked. (I was tempted to hack the station and make the transit system work faster, but that would be suspicious and station security would probably figure it out and then Indah would give me a stern lecture and it would be a whole thing.)
But ART was right. CU#1 was standing with its arms crossed, and aside from the murder-rage expression, it was staring at the floor. CU#2 just looked nervous, and was halfway hidden behind CU#1. I pinged for their drones, to try and get their attention, but nothing came back. That was weird. So I pinged them directly.
They both looked in my direction. The security officer that had been talking to them was finished, and was now mostly acting as a physical barrier between the humans and the ComfortUnits, and was more concerned with the yelling human who was now also asking to speak to station security management and honestly I stopped listening outside of keyword tagging if they started to get really aggressive.
What do you want? CU #1 asked.
Why aren’t you using your drones? Do you need the module? It hadn’t occurred to me that they might not have the right piloting modules for drones. I could give them a copy of my own, if they needed it.
We know how to use drones, CU #2 said, and wow that was unnecessarily snippy.
Did you come all this way just to bother us about drones? Or are you here to enjoy the spectacle? CU #1 added, twice as snippy, which was a truly impressive level of snippiness.
I wasn’t totally sure what to say here. What could I do for them? I couldn’t change the fact they were ComfortUnits, and would probably continue to be bothered by Corporation Rim fuckheads from time to time while they looked so obviously like ComfortUnits, and security already had a good handle on the situation. What could I do?
Have you considered a configuration change? It can help with blending in.
CU #1 snorted and rolled its eyes. Why the fuck would I do that? I like the way I look.
I had one cleared by my doctor, but they said since my refugee documentation hasn’t even fully cleared the system yet, it would be a little while before they could get the documentation for a configuration change to go through, CU#2 added. This caused CU#1’s expression to change briefly, before it went back to what seemed like its default pissed-off expression.
I was confused. Why the fuck do you need it cleared?
We’re constructs; a cosmetic configuration change wasn’t really any more complicated than a haircut, with a competent medical suite. (There was someone with a competent medical suite leaning heavily on me in the feed right now, in fact, sending me a catalog of all the simple configuration changes it could do. Yeah, yeah, I got the hint.)
Shouldn’t you know? You’re their pet SecUnit, and you’re clearly not standard, CU#1 said and I didn’t realize someone could sound quite that scathing in the feed. Years of wisdom (hah) prevented me from making a shitty comment that I knew would just upset them more.
I may have a solution for you. What do you want to change? I asked.
Both ComfortUnits seemed skeptical, but CU#2 must have been more desperate for a configuration change than I originally thought.
My factory default hair was darker, and curly, and my eyes looked...not like this. The contract before the one you found us on paid to have our configurations changed to this, it said, then added, It was my first configuration change.
ART was already putting schematics in my feed. I waved it off. I really didn’t need to know the details of what it was going to do.
I can have that arranged to be done for you, I said.
When?
Today. As soon as you're done here.
CU#2’s expression was more than I was willing to absorb, right now, since it was so painfully hopeful. CU#1’s expression, on the other hand, was something I was a little more used to. It was clearly upset CU#2 wanted to change its configuration, but I wasn’t exactly sure why.
If you change your mind, I can arrange one for you too, I told it.
I already told you I don’t want one. This wasn’t my first configuration change, but it is my last.
I shrugged. Fair enough.
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I honestly didn’t expect doing a nice thing for CU#2 to come back and bite me in the ass quite like it did.
El-Amin and Fanita from Preservation Alliance Immigration and Refugee Services were already kind of a lot to deal with, but if it had just been them, then I wouldn’t have had much of an issue. At least not as much of an issue as Pin-Lee and Kaede had.
And then PASDOS got involved, and I had gotten dragged into the whole shit show.
The Preservation Alliance System Department of Outsystem Security was a newer department, with a mouthful of a name, and had been fledgling when I first immigrated to Preservation. They began to gain traction and funding when the entire DeltFall incident had happened, and had really had a boom in growth after the assassination attempt on Mensah (that I thwarted with absolutely zero help from them, but whatever.)
We had, on occasion, shared a working relationship, and they had contracted me in the past in a consultant position to help them learn and prepare for what they may be facing when the Corporation Rim inevitably came knocking on Preservation’s door. For the most part I liked their work, and I was pretty pleased that Preservation was finally taking outsystem threats seriously.
I was less than pleased when they had decided CU#2’s minor appearance modification somehow warranted their attention, and they were less than pleased that the Preservation government was sanctioning small-scale corporate takedowns, and PAIRS was less than pleased PASDOS was involving themselves in something that they stated in a memo (that I definitely obtained in a normal, non-feed hacking way) was none of PASDOS’s business. And Pin-Lee was outright pissed that PAIRS and PASDOS were bothering her client over a minor appearance adjustment (no different than if a human dyed their hair and got some visual augments.) (CU#2 hadn’t actually been her client until an hour before this meeting started, which was ten minutes after I had told her the meeting was happening, which was three minutes after CU#2 pinged me with an urgent assistance request because it had been suddenly informed it would need to explain its recent appearance change. But Pin-Lee is prone to collecting clients, kind of like I am.)
We were at a less-than-pleased-ranging-to-pissed stalemate of sorts.
“-and I will reiterate that I don’t understand why my client is being hassled over a minor appearance change completed by a private third party.” Pin-Lee was saying in her super intimidating CombatUnit Lawyer voice. The table we were sitting at in a private meeting room in Station Security had a hard display surface, that was currently showing before and after images of CU#2 as well as the document ART had created on the spot stating that I had the clearance to approve usage of its MedSystem for minor cosmetic augmentations. (PAIRS and PASDOS didn’t have clearance to know about ART’s existence, so it was relegated to loudly fuming in my feed while it supplied Kaede footnotes from Preservation laws on all the ways the University could sue PASDOS. Kaede was talking to it in the feed in a placating way since it was kind of being a lot right now.)
“Its documentation hasn’t even fully cleared our system. Now all of its appearance markers will need to be redocumented,” El-Amin said.
Pin-Lee nodded, “That’s understandable, but there’s a form for that. I’ve had clients in the past who have had to fill it out, but they weren’t called to a meeting and hassled like you’re currently doing to my client. And I still don’t understand why you’re involved.” She had turned her gaze to the PASDOS reps, who wore suits that I wasn’t entirely sure they realized made them look a little like corporate solicitors. Their demeanor didn’t help.
El-Amin and Fanita looked vaguely annoyed, and a little tired (Preservation, despite all of its attractive and enticing features, didn’t actually receive that many immigrants or refugees each year, so PAIRS was actually a pretty small operation. And now they were inundated with more refugees than they’d ever had to handle at one time.) Meanwhile, Bindu and Tekira from PASDOS looked ice cold neutral. I would have been impressed by their intimidation tactic if it wasn’t directed at CU#2, who was shrinking under their gaze. (I also suspected it was meant to intimidate me as well, but I’m prone to thinking things are about me that aren't. Also Bindu and Tekira seemed to conveniently forget where they learned that particular expression.)
“We have concerns over what kind of augments ComfortUnit #2 has received,” Tekira said. I felt ART shift in the feed, and its fuming quieted. Now it was scarily interested, which was an interesting new combination of emotions. Kaede raised her eyebrow and made an unnecessary hand motion that enlarged the clearance form I had “filled out” and that she had “cosigned” indicating what augments CU#2 had received. “They’re clearly listed here, as you can see. There were two procedures done, one to its hair color and texture and one to its eye color.”
“So the form says,” Tekira said, and only glanced at the document.
There was a shift, and Pin-Lee was rapidly pulling up forms in her feed (rapidly for a human) and Kaede was fielding a large stack of documents from ART.
There was a moment of silence before Pin-Lee said, calmly, “I would be very careful about what you’re implying right now, because you may start something you’re not ready for.”
Bindu did not look nearly as scared as they should have when they said, “Is that so?”
Tekira leaned forward in his chair, and made a placating gesture and smiled at CU#2. “Listen, it’s an easy fix. ComfortUnit #2, all we ask is for you to submit yourself to a weapons scan and a brief search of your arms.”
A lot of emotions happened in the room; ART became heavy in my feed and let out a string of profanity that made me blink, Pin-Lee opened a new file in her shared workspace with Kaede called “Suing the Fuck Out Of These Assholes”, and even the duo from PAIRS were staring at PISSOFFDOS like they weren’t sure what they had just heard was right.
But most importantly, CU#2 was freaking out. Not outwardly, since it was a ComfortUnit and extremely good at only expressing the emotions it wanted to (I was half tempted to ask for a copy of its module but the thought of doing that made me have more complicated emotions), but in the feed it was dumping anxiety that was bordering on panic. Only ART and I could feel it, and, from the increased activity in its feed, probably also CU#1, if I had to make an educated guess on who it was talking to.
What do I do? Maybe I should just do it. They won’t leave me alone if I don’t, it said in the four-way feed with myself, Pin-Lee, Kaede, and it (and also technically ART but it didn’t know that) (I also wasn’t sure why I was being included in this feed conversation; I wasn’t a lawyer.)
No, don’t. That’s a violation of your rights. They can’t make you, and they’ve got another thing coming if they think they can, Pin-Lee said, and even her feed voice was terrifying.
“Agent, my client will not be submitting itself to any searches. You have the documentation proving what it had done, and, according to Article 3, subsection 2 of PASDOS’s code of conduct, unless you have due reason, you cannot detain my client. So we’re done here. Now as for you,” she returned her terrifying gaze to El-Amin and Fanita, who did at least have the smarts enough to look slightly nervous, “you’ll find you already have the necessary documentation and images in the PAIRS inbox to update your profile for ComfortUnit 2, so we are also done here. Any more questions?”
The PAIRS team shook their heads, and tried to say something placating, but Pin-Lee put her hand up, and they stopped speaking, which was arguably the coolest thing I have ever seen her do. (Have I mentioned how scary she is?)
Everyone stood up, in that way humans do when they’re ending a meeting, and I didn’t plan to stick around any longer than I had to.
“Just think about it, yeah? It could really show cooperativeness,” Tekira was saying, but I was already pushing CU#2 out the door.
Shouldn’t we stay? It asked.
No. Let Pin-Lee and Kaede handle them. You might not understand it now, but they’ve hugely overstepped, I said. It didn’t need to witness what was going to happen next. Neither did I, but I was eternally paranoid, so the drone in Pin-Lee’s pocket gave me an auditory front row seat to her casually eviscerating Bindu and Tekira in the form of legal threats that I knew she had every intention of following through on.
CU#1 was waiting outside, and CU#2 literally ran to its arms. CU#1 looked at me, and requested a status. I sent an all clear, and it pinged me with polite acknowledgment, which was the nicest it had ever been to me up until this point.
I got the fuck out of there.
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I was still fuming about the entire incident two days later when, in the middle of the cycle rest period, Three sent me an urgent request for assistance with a location marker and access to three of its drone inputs. I opened the inputs, and started running as ART placed an emergency comm call to station security.
At nearly my top speed, it still took me 4.56 minutes to get from my hotel room to the secondary loading dock, just in time to see Three knocked to the ground by the swinging fists of one of the newly rogue SecUnits, who was then promptly swallowed by the grabbing arms of three of the other newly rogue SecUnits. There was one SecUnit standing off to the side, just watching as I dove in and pulled Three to its feet. The skin on its cheek looked swollen, and its eyebrow was split. The way it was cradling its arm (just recently rebuilt by ART from near tatters) indicated that this was not the first hit it had taken in the time since this incident (or whatever this was) had started.
“What the fuck is going on here?” I asked. The question was to the group as a whole, but I was looking at the small cluster of SecUnits who were currently holding down the one who had hit Three. I recognized the assailant as SU#5, and it wasn’t thrashing around but it did look angry , which had my threat assessment module scrambling to give me a readout.
“It said it needed my assistance with something, and then began attacking me with no provocation,” Three answered. Right then five people from station security came running in, including Senior Officer Lia who looked at me. “SecUnit,” was all she said as she and other security officers came closer. I put my hand up and they stopped, which I appreciated. There was still the chance the situation could escalate, and squishy humans were the last thing I needed to worry about.
SU#6, who had been watching and not doing anything, came to stand next to SU#5. They stared at each other for a moment, probably talking in the feed, before SU#6 said, “I told you this wasn’t the way.” To which SU#5 responded, “Fuck you.” But it didn’t look that angry anymore, just sad. SU#6’s expression was about the same. I found this to be mildly concerning.
SU#6 looked at the security officers, and then the other SecUnits who were still holding down SU#5. “You can let it go. It’ll go peacefully,” it said, and I kind of believed it, despite everything.
ART?
I’ve got it. If it makes a wrong move, I’ll force it into a shutdown, ART responded in its totally-not-a-supervillain voice.
I looked at Officer Lia’s shoulder. “I believe it. Let it up, please.” The three SecUnits holding it made confused expressions, but backed off after a moment of hesitation where they probably seriously considered ignoring my request, which I’m sure was extremely novel for them.
As security walked SU#5 out, SU#6 close behind them, I had a weird gut feeling I couldn’t really place, but it made me really sad.
I needed to know what was wrong with this rogue, and I had a good idea who might know.
-
“I can’t tell you that. It’s doctor-patient confidentiality,” Bharadwaj said. It was six hours later, early in the cycle morning, and she was carefully holding a mug of hot beverage like it was the most important thing in the world. Her voice was still rough from sleep.
“But it's important for security. It attacked Three,” I said, and gestured to Three, who was sitting next to me on Bhardwaj’s office couch.
Bharadwaj shrugged, and drank more of her hot beverage before responding, “I understand that, but that doesn’t mean I can, or would, violate SecUnit 5’s privacy. Also, you’re not currently contracted with station security so it’s nunya-business. ” I glanced through her feed, something that I didn’t do to my humans that often anymore, but I found a correspondence with Pin-Lee from a few minutes after I asked to meet with her, which confirmed I didn’t currently have a contract with station security.
Your humans know you very well, ART said. It had been mostly quiet (as quiet as ART was capable of being despite its nosiness), but it was still heavy in my feed like always.
It’s a little rude that she made assumptions about me.
It was less an assumption and more a well educated guess.
Still rude.
Then explain why you’re frowning in that way that means you’re feeling fond? And also feeling fondness?
I resisted the urge to flick off the drone I knew ART was piloting, since I was still trying to appear serious to Bharadwaj, and instead blocked it from my feed. It broke through the block instantly, and settled back down all smug and pleased.
“Then would it be alright if we spoke to it?” Three asked
Bharadwaj looked thoughtful, and she finished her drink. “I don’t see why not. But please be careful. It’s still...fragile. If it seems like it's getting upset you have to leave it alone.”
I didn’t really understand the implications of calling SU#5 fragile , of all things, but I guessed I would find out.
-
After station security had taken it away, it had been taken to medical, actually. On the way in I noticed SU#2 and #9 (I had had to skip designating one #3, since we already had Three, and it would just get confusing) sitting outside of the medical wing, doing something in the feed. I decided that them sitting was a good sign, and didn’t bother them. Several of their drones watched Three and I as we entered, but didn’t follow us, since they were following Security’s rules.
SU#5 was facing the wall opposite the door when we came in. It didn’t turn to face Three or I when we entered the room it was in, but did watch us with some of its drones. It wasn’t really in the feed much, but I did feel some activity from it in some of the news feeds. (I had already checked and there was no report about the incident last night, since it had been so late and station security had put a medical seal on the story so it couldn’t be shared for a minimum of one month.)
“Hi,” I said. It didn’t respond.
“SecUnit 5, we would like some information about last night, if that’s alright?” Three asked. SU#5 shifted, just barely, almost imperceptibly, but it still didn’t respond.
Perhaps Three should wait outside of the room, ART suggested in our three-way feed. Three sent an acknowledgement, and left the room before I could say anything. (I guess that made sense, since it had been the one SU#5 assaulted.)
“5, why did you attack Three?” I asked. I waited for a response. (I considered sitting down to make a point, but I realized that might be kind of aggressive and I wasn’t trying to be aggressive.)
No response. SU#5 shifted again, just a little, just to look at the drone I had trained on its front since it was facing away from me slightly. I was about ready to ask again when two things happened. First, through my drones in the hall, I saw an attendant was on their way, presumably to make sure I wasn't distressing SU#5 or something. At the same time, ART was pulling footage from my drone that was focused on SU#5. It zoomed in, and highlighted SU#5’s gunports.
The skin around both of them was red and swollen. Like they had been dug at with a blunt object. I realized SU#5’s hands were balled up in fists, and had been this entire time. I couldn’t see what it's fingertips looked like.
I will inform a nurse, but I believe we should leave, ART said. I sent an affirmative. I turned my gaze and all my drones away from Su#5 and went for the door. I felt like I should say something. ART was always riding me about manners or whatever, but anything I might say got stuck in my throat, and I couldn’t form words. ( “See you later” or “sorry for the bother” or anything like that seemed so stupid and all I wanted to do was leave. Right now. Like right now, right now.)
I sent SU#5 a farewell ping and left the room at a normal pace.
I breezed past Three, and then the nurse, and Three had to catch up to me. (Which probably said something about how fast I was going, considering SecUnits can walk really fast.)
Did it say anything? Three asked. We were still within range of SU#5’s drones, and I tried not to pay attention to any of them as I exited the medical wing and rounded on the SU#2 and #9, who hadn’t moved.
“Do you have any idea why it did what it did?” I asked, and looked at the space between their shoulders. They looked off to the side of my face, as well, which helped.
“Yes,” #2 said.
“And why’s that?” I said, and #9’s expression became perplexed.
“You don’t know?” it asked. I shook my head; some words seemed to be willing to come out and some seemed to keep getting trapped.
There was activity in the feed between them, before #2 said, “It’s not our business to tell. But you’re older than us, by your model, and we’re old as meteorite, so you can figure it out.”
I wasn’t sure why this made me so unreasonably angry. I could feel my face contort, and Three hurried to step in as ART leaned heavily on me in the feed. I turned and walked away as Three gave them farewell pleasantries. I had nearly turned a corner when #9 pinged me. I stopped as it locked a feed connection with me and said, We don’t approve of its method, but we understand the reason. We’ll try to mitigate further incidents that result in harm to others, if that helps.
It did not help, and I left as fast as I could.
... --- -- . - .... .. -. --. ... --- -- . - .... .. -. --. ... . . .. -. --. - .... . ... . .-.. ..-. .. -. --- - .... . .-. ...
I wasn’t the only one who was exhausted by all of this. I wasn’t entirely sure just how my humans were wrapped up in this, but Pin-Lee was for sure working non-stop, Bharadwaj had talked so much the past few days that she only replied to Arada’s gentle reminders to hydrate with dismissive grunts, and Dr. Mensah had gone to sleep over an hour before station lights out. (No, she had gone to bed, but not to sleep immediately - I had to threaten her with blocking her feed interfaces first.)
Oddly enough, it had been me who suggested spending time together. I didn’t know where that came from either, but I really needed to be in the vague vicinity of a bunch of people who would not start any trouble with each other or me or station security that I would need to fix. And somehow, for once, holing up alone with ART somewhere didn’t seem like the ideal solution to the tension I was feeling, or the strange pain in my neck and jaw. Maybe I just wanted to know they were safe, and calm, and resting. And to rest with them.
When I sent the request into their feed schedules for a shared quiet group activity (I was awkward phrasing this. I didn't expect them to want to watch media - humans that are exhausted can get overwhelmed by too much noise and images - but I also didn't want to invite them for a meal period, which was the human equivalent, I guess) some of my drone inputs showed me how some of them relaxed at the opportunity to take a break. Humans needed excuses to take breaks, sometimes, and what was a better excuse than the antisocial SecUnit demanding social time?
(Yes, ART laughed at me for this.)
So we just sat around in Bharadwaj's private apartment, which didn't have the largest room for sitting purposes, meaning we all scattered through the different rooms. Which was okay. Arada came by to talk to me (“Well, you weren’t hiding in a corner so I thought you wouldn’t mind,” and I didn’t, actually), telling me about some small crafting hobby she had gotten into recently. No fighting rogue units, nothing about shitty visitors messing with the ComfortUnits. No stress.
It was nice.
Up until Arada got yawny. A yawny Arada was often a huggy one, so I suggested she move to the sofa. She did. But she was also shivering and most likely going to ask me if I could sit close by and heat myself up for her sometime soon. While woozy and sleepy humans were usually not very hard to keep safe, and to some degree even… cute , was the word ART would use here, they sometimes also leaned on me. Sometimes that was okay. Not today, not after all this.
I was here for relaxing, not tensing up more.
The directionless assistance ping I received was almost the ideal excuse to get up and leave before I was dragged into a cuddle puddle, as I knew some humans called it. (That wouldn’t happen, realistically. My humans are good humans.)
Almost , because I didn't quite get why a bot pinged me, of all people on this station, for assistance. I slipped out of Bharadwaj's apartment quietly.
The station lights were dimming already, preparing the humans for their rest period, which also meant there were fewer people on the paths between the southern residential area and the direction the ping came from.
By now, the bot sent not just pings for assistance and queries that sounded very lost and confused, but also full on distress codes. System system , cycling through several possible bot languages.
You’d think that as a murderbot as old as me, with all that experience in fighting and sneaking and infiltration and whatnot, I’d have figured out what was happening earlier.
I located the pings as originating from the private docks. In the Corporation Rim, that area would have been called a commercial dock, used for transporting necessary goods like food and oxygen processors from the planet to the station, and from the station to other stations or towards shuttles and ships. Preservation didn’t do commerce with necessities like that. But because of that, import and export happened more sporadically, not on a strict schedule - when something broke, it was sent for repair, or replaced. When there was an abundance of a certain type of food on the planet, it was sent to the station, etc etc. There were regular shipments, of course, to ensure resources on the station didn’t run out, but those happened when humans were awake and working.
Did I wonder why there was a lone bot hanging out in the docks beeping sadly?
Yes.
Did I notice that as I went, making my way through near-empty corridors, slowly but surely my feed began getting thinner until it fizzled out?
Also yes.
It made just the right amount of sense to me to not make me question any of this further. The bot’s feed address was vaguely familiar, or at least I thought I had come across it before. I asked ART for its specs and a location analysis while dipping around a corner, but ART seemed distracted by something and was distant in the feed, and with how small it had folded itself up in the feed it couldn’t focus on as many things as it was used to, and sent me nothing more than what I could access through the public feed anyway. So I just did my own research, and worked with what I had.
(It was odd not having ART as large and overbearing as it was, but it had been making the new rogue constructs and even a few of the station bots nervous, and had reduced its feed presence in response. Neither of us liked the situation, but it was the only solution we had.)
I figured out that it was a combat bot, or at least that was the only logical conclusion to the way it formatted its distress signals - rehabilitated, probably. I wondered how much scrutiny it had undergone when it integrated into the community of Preservation Station bots, how the others treated it, after that disaster with Balin from years ago. Thinking of that made me uneasy.
And yes, maybe I should have wondered why none of the other station bots were pinging in, or approaching the vicinity. A bot pinging for help usually attracted at least three bots willing to help. I was too tired, I guess, to notice the hacking traces.
When I arrived at the dock, the station lit the area up around me as if I was a human who needed to see, and there was no oversized broken bot who had toppled over and needed help recollecting itself anywhere to be seen. (That’s what I was assuming had happened. It made no sense, considering the bot was sending every single assistance request possible, and not just one for “help I have fallen and I cant get up.”) In fact, there was nothing. Nothing moved, just an expanse of loading zones and neatly stacked transport crates and two idle shuttles, marked as outsystem and offline for charging, docked. The two hauler bots who were permanently stationed here were offline, or recharging. Either way, they hadn’t responded to the bot’s pings, and I had no idea if hauler bots were even able to wake up from a scheduled recharge like constructs could. This was as far as I could locate the ping, though. The coordinates were not super detailed.
I sent another ping into the feed, searching for the bot.
There was no feed.
I staggered from the sudden absence of it, the emptiness in my head. ART? No response. Had I been hacked?
My feet slid into a ready stance while my organics shivered, but just for a second. Then I was calm. Spreading my drones through the dock (and I’d love to tell ART that I was right to ask for drones that didn't rely on a surrounding feed, just my own onboard circuits back when we found out that aliens could invade my drones through the feed), I tried to understand what was going on, already convinced I had walked into a trap. I just needed to find out what kind of trap.
Something had lured me here under false pretenses.
I picked up on the movement a second too late, realizing as I did that the hostile was using some kind of camouflage pattern. Seeing the hostile was hard, but the telltale whir of a large mechanical body (or armor) as it pivoted and aimed as well as the static hiss and crackle of a deploying energy weapon told me to move.
The shot I evaded grazed the top of my head and singed my hair.
No, that wasn’t it - it did something to my hair. Like it was disintegrating, not burning.
There, right in front of me, taking a moment that it shouldn’t be wasting, stood a SecUnit, both weapons deployed. I recognized the build of those weapons immediately - unstable, using strange synthetics. LinTec. Pinging for ART again, receiving nothing but an empty feed echo, I adjusted my posture into something more defensive. Looking the SecUnit up and down, I understood why the pings I had gotten had read like a combat bot. Fuck.
“What do you want?” I asked. Maybe, maybe there was a way to settle this without killing each other.
“I want to kill you,” the Combat SecUnit said.
Nevermind.
I charged.
Notes:
Image ID: The "cheating boyfriend" meme. A man wearing a plaid shirt labelled "the authors of the fic" is holding hands with a woman in a blue tank top labelled "a nice, easy, emotionally satisfying chapter". The man is turning to stare at a passing woman wearing red who is labelled "VIOLENCE". The woman in blue is looking at the back of the man's head in disgust/disbelief. End Image ID
Chapter 17
Summary:
Warnings for this chapter:
-canon-typical violence
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Attacking from the front was stupid, but it was the only chance I had, considering the Combat SecUnit was charging at me as well. We were set to clash directly into each other, hopefully , because the harder I tried to aim at it, the harder it was for me to see it. It wasn’t in armor, but it must have coated its clothes and skin with some kind of camouflaging substance or pattern, or maybe some kind of powerfield. (I had seen this before but the dots didn’t connect.)
The shot I took at it directly was evaded easily, which, yeah, duh. As it pivoted almost lazily, it fired for my legs, but I sidestepped with similar ease. It had said it wanted to kill me, hadn’t it? It wasn’t acting like it.
However, its discharged shot seared a crackling hole into the dock wall, dissolving it into rubble and dust. I had seen this kind of weapon before, I realized - I should have paid closer attention when ART analyzed the data from the strange synthetics after we took LinTec down. Did every shitty SecUnit nowadays have weird corrosive materials in its guns? I didn’t have time to worry about that right now, though, because I guessed a direct hit with those guns might hurt.
I deployed a malware attack I had prepared and used during our attack on AllianZwei, but as my code tumbled into the nothingness in the absence of a feed I realized that wouldn’t work. I’d need some kind of connection to this other unit. A drone hit me in the side of the head so hard I toppled over and tumbled, rolled back to my feet and reoriented.
The CombatUnit was out of sight.
The flitting camouflaged drones turned the area around me into a fata morgana of some sort, and any visual inputs from my drones only confused me more. I shut them off - not the drones, just the input. I could still fly them. But if the CombatUnit was as good at picking up feed signatures as I was, it would think my drones were now inactive.
I switched my eyes to filter for heat, not movement, and that helped, although now I couldn't really see the combat’s drones anymore. Now I knew where it was.
As I prepared, I took a moment to flick away some of my immediate responses to this fight. Something was wrong with all of this. A CombatUnit just showing up trying to kill me, but not doing it? Was it enjoying this fight? I had too many questions I needed to ask.
I laid low, pretending to be confused still, waiting for the right moment to catch the other unit by surprise. Without the feed, and without hacking, my choices were limited. Sure, the other unit had weird fucking weapons (where the guns had hit, the holes just kept growing, like acid, or corroding material. It prickled on my scalp, where my hair had gotten singed), but I’m still me. I’ve fought worse.
The Combat closed in, spotting me just a second too late, and I tackled it into a close quarter fight. I had to be fast enough not to take a shot to the head, but I managed. I let it twist free and try to leap at me. I spun, dropped backwards, and kicked up against it. For a moment I thought it would go flying, but it latched onto me instead, and with the force of its fall we tumbled and rolled. I had it pinned to the ground, and could see the blazing blue LinTec logo seared in the flat of its irises.
“I thought you were going to kill me,” I said, stalling, as I clamped its arms together between us. If I shot it now, it would shoot back before it died, and then we’d both be dead, and I didn’t want us to die.
“I’m going to make you pay first,” it snarled out between pointed teeth.
So it was a rogue, with agency and all that shit. Good to know. (Now I didn't have to worry about corporate humans on my station that would have to be tracked down later, too.) I wouldn't have had the time to hack it rogue to save myself anyway, so – no, wait, a rogue trying to kill you is bad.
The sharp hatred on its face told me I had less than a second to talk to it. “Pay for what?”
“Everything,” it hissed and bucked, so I slammed it with a drone. If I had my explosive drones I might have been able to kill it right then. But I wasn’t really trying to, was I? Something was wrong and it was potentially my fault and if I could get this CombatUnit to let me try and help then nobody needed to die. The drone to the head didn’t make it reel as much as I expected, and maybe I should have tried to kill it because suddenly it overpowered me, drawing strength from somewhere in its body where I definitely had none. It shoved me into the ground and pushed to its feet to stand over me, gun raised again but pointed not at my chest or head but my side. A shot, and I rolled away, getting grazed again, a tear now in my side that was eating away at me and fuck that hurt - did it think it was going to torture me?
“You are pulling your punches,” the CombatUnit almost shouted.
I curled to my feet and leaped for cover behind one of the inactive bots, wondered for a moment why the commotion hadn’t woken it, tried pinging it, realized I couldn’t, and hoped the CombatUnit hadn’t done anything to the bot. I took a moment to inspect it as much as I could, no damage, no outward sign of harm, energy still thrumming through it. It was fine, only asleep. I could not use it as a shield. As I advanced again, the CombatUnit spotted me before I could catch it, hitting me in the leg. Armor might have been able to save my knee from that one.
My run turned into a fall and I rolled behind a crate, immediately jumped up again to make use of knowing its location before I lost it again. I fired, hitting it in the shoulder, but because CombatUnits are just shitty like that the blow didn’t tear out its shoulder, which would have gotten rid of that terrible weapon. It stumbled and staggered, let out some kind of frustrated fighting yell. I hid again, distracting it with my drones.
If the CombatUnit had hit my shoulder like that, my arm might have fully rotted off or whatever it was that strange weapon was doing. Unless the updates ART had given my skin helped with that, and that was the only reason the grazing shots hadn’t eaten me alive yet. Oh shit, ART! Did it notice my absence in the feed? I reached for my internal feed and the connection I had to the comm device ART had given me, still tucked under my ribs, where it had been for fifteen years now. Allocating all processes I could spare to free up space, I activated the comm device and tried to broadcast my location as loudly and strongly as I possibly could, along with, ART, help!
I could do this for only a fragment of a moment, because if I spent too much time screaming for help and waiting for a reply, the CombatUnit would use that time to kill me. I still didn’t know why it wanted to kill me.
It was a LinTec unit. I had freed it, and all the other workers, from that shithole of a company.
Right, and then we ran away to let everyone take care of themselves. Looking at that utter hatred on that unit’s face, it probably went badly.
That realization hit me at the same time as the crate I was hiding behind blew up, and tore off the outer layer of my back alongside it. Ow.
I switched a backburner to just constantly ping for ART. I couldn’t afford waiting for a reply, and I couldn’t afford thinking about whether or not it would work. Having parts of my back muscles and spine slowly corroding from shitty alien synthetics or whatever it was that LinTec put into its SecUnits hurt and slowed me down significantly. I wouldn’t have much time left to somehow end this.
From behind me, the CombatUnit called out, “Why are you letting me win?” It sounded so frustrated. Angry. I didn’t want to waste time explaining that I wasn’t trying to win, I was trying to find a solution that it wasn’t aware even existed.
Eventually my time ran out. It wasn't even a hit from the CombatUnit that caused me to fall - I lost feeling in my left leg and stumbled, and crashed face down. As I rolled to my back, I saw the Combat stalking towards me with the kind of prowl villains in media sometimes did - the one that said ‘I know you won't escape me anymore now.’
ART, you have less than a minute , I thought to myself but didn't send it, since it was pointless.
It halted only when it was standing almost above me. I could have tried scrabbling away backwards, but with the crumbling stump I called a leg, and just from my gut feeling that I wasn't in a very survivable situation, I guessed it wouldn't do much good.
I should be saying something. Looking up at the Combat SecUnit’s face, eyes alight with so much emotion and determination, I found nothing to say.
“Do you remember me?” it finally said. It had its weapon pointed neatly at my powercore. ART’s comm device was right above it. Would ART feel me die?
“Yes,” I replied. My voice was strained, but that answer alone made the CombatUnit tense up. “You were working for LinTec when we took it down.”
“Is that what you call it?”
So my assumption had been right. “I’m sorry,” I said, skipping the part where I explained and defended myself. It scoffed at me, and fired a shot right beside my torso, scorching the ground.
“Who are you,” the CombatUnit snarled, and my organics chilled. “Who are you to mess with other's lives like that? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“Do you call being a governed SecUnit for a shitty company a ‘life’?”
It shot again, and this time it grazed my side. I couldn’t help the groan - not even dulled pain sensors could make me ignore the feeling of my body literally corroding. “What do you know about my life with LinTec?”
“Enough to know there’s something better out there.” Maybe I should have just shut up. After so many cycles of wrangling with the consequences of freeing constructs from their governor modules and companies, maybe I should have learned to not make assumptions about the feelings of others based on my own. I was afraid, okay?
“What’s the point?”
Something on its face changed. Beneath the fury was something very, very tired. A desperate sort of boredom. Or boredom as a means to abate despair. I looked it in the eyes. It looked away, blinked, and that little crack smoothed over again.
“Take a fucking guess what happened after you left.” Another shot, into the ground again. “Guess.”
“No. Just tell me.”
It scoffed again, like I was being ridiculous. “Humans will scramble over each other to fill a power vacuum. They will stop at nothing to prove they’re stronger than the rest. And you know what makes a human stronger? A loyal little SecUnit. ”
The way it spit that word made it sound like an insult. Maybe it was meant as one.
“You don't have to pretend like killing me would make you feel better”, I said.
In slow motion, it lowered itself down to kneel over me, one hand pressing down on my chest, the other wedging its weapon directly under my chin. Maybe it, too, had watched at least some human media. I could summon up enough energy to blast its own head off, right now. Something in me told me not to.
“You’re right,” it said, “nothing can make me feel better. I am completely and utterly alone.”
“The other units on the station–,” I began; the ones Three and I had taken down on our way to LinTec’s servers. We had given them the helpme.file, too.
“Thought they could help our clients.”
It had been their friend. I thought of Three, and the way it still sometimes quietly grieved for One and Two, and the little mural it had painted for them in its permanent location on Preservation’s prime planet.
“I’m sorry.”
It looked down at me. The weapon was still pushed under my jaw, but the CombatUnit’s shoulders started dropping, for a second. Then it caught itself. “This is your fault. I’ll kill you.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t care.”
“My friends will catch you.” It stared at me. “My friend ART will kill you, too.” I was sure of that. ART could crush a construct’s brain through the feed in a matter of milliseconds. If ART was around right now, the CombatUnit might already be dead, or at least disabled. “Is that what you want?”
“I don’t care. ”
“I don’t believe you.” Flicking through my various drone inputs, I surveyed the area. “Did you kill your clients?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You lured me out here. It’s just us. No humans, no other constructs. Even the bots are asleep.”
“You caused all of this.” My organics had an awful reaction to the anger in the ComabtUnit’s voice. Somehow, I kept my voice calm.
“The two bots at this dock - you didn’t hit them. You brought me out here so you wouldn’t hurt anyone else.”
“Because you caused this.”
“You don’t want to be a mindless killing machine either.”
It breathed out through the nose in frustration. “Don’t you dare make assumptions about me.”
“If you wanted to kill me,” I said, much more slowly this time, “I wouldn’t be making assumptions about anything right now.”
Those blazing eyes narrowed.
Then the mask of fury and determination crumbled. Almost as if in slow motion, the CombatUnit sank forward, its head hitting my chest. (I couldn’t afford the distraction, so I shoved my feelings about this amount of physical contact with anyone far, far into a backburner.)
With a much quieter, much more hollow-sounding voice, it whispered again, “What’s the point?”
When I didn’t have an answer, it rammed the gun into my jaw, as if to remind me it was still there. I hadn't forgotten. I knew this wasn't over. “What’s the point?!”
“The point of what?”
It yelled something, echo glitching like it was trying to vent a feeling that could not be expressed with human words. “What is the point of a hard-won victory if the battle leaves you broken?”
A spark of a feed connection crackled through my chest. Shit. I sent, ART, if you get this, careful, I’ve come this far already.
I didn’t want ART to kill this construct. I said to it, “I dont know.”
“Thought so.”
“But that doesn't mean you can't find out.”
“Bullshit.”
“You can find it. Meaning, I mean. I can't help you with that, but I know people who can.”
I had to really focus not to physically twitch when ART connected my feed again. A whole lot of data flooded me, and ART almost broke into my head, large and heavy and angry and afraid for me.
Through the feed I said, ART, wait.
“Back away,” I said out loud, to the CombatUnit. “My friend is here now. Kill me now and you lose your chance to find out.”
For a second, I thought I had fucked up. Then, slowly, the other construct eased off me. The moment it removed its gun from my head and folded it away, I felt ART’s presence surge, deafening me. As soon as I was able to, I said out loud, “ART, don’t hurt it.”
The CombatUnit was on its feet now, hands at its sides, staring into nothing.
I have it under control, ART hissed.
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ART held steadfast onto the CombatUnit until Station Security showed up. That was really the only way to handle this, no matter how little I liked it. Things were already so strained with the humans holding official positions on the station, with all those new constructs trying to find their place. If I were to take full charge and pull something off on my own, I might tip tensions into a direction nobody wanted them to go to. That stand-offish ComfortUnit already was in trouble for acting as rogue as it did.
I managed to convince ART to stop completely freezing the CombatUnit the way it did. The CombatUnit eventually sat down on the ground, when it realized it could not go anywhere with ART in its head. It sat down like it was used to doing just that, at least. Once the battle rage and lust for revenge drained out of it, it hung its head and didn't do much else.
“Why don’t you just shut me down?” A few minutes had passed, and ART had informed me that it requested Station Security, that they were on their way, and that I would have no chance of evading the trip to medical with the way I was still leaking and slowly losing body mass to weird corrosive synthetic weapon attacks. The CombatUnit didn’t look at me as it spoke. “You can’t contain me.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But the humans here don’t just kill people.”
“I’m not ‘people.’”
My organics cramped, and I didn't thing it was only because of my rapidly dissolving wounds. “That’s what you think.”
The other construct shifted. “Is that what you’re going to do? Brainwash me into thinking I’m a human?” I didn’t reply, because I saw no point in discussing this with it, right now. It kept talking. “No, that’s too much effort. I still want to kill you. You killed my friends. You took everything.”
I turned my auditory inputs down until the other unit was merely a low rumble in the background, though I kept my drones trained on it just in case it decided to try to get me again. I knew it wouldn’t. It was in denial about its own existence, and I was its chosen villain. As long as I was there, it had a reason to stick around. Or something similarly weird and uncomfortable.
ART spent the time until Station Security arrived by rebuilding the feed. Apparently, the Combat had not only locked me and itself out of the feed, it had also coded a simulacrum-feed that led ART to think I was just on a walk, doing not much at all. But below that, the CombatUnit had all but disassembled the feed, destroying relay-connections as efficiently as a laser scalpel through flesh. I wondered how it did that, and directed ART when rebuilding the feed to reinforce it where it could. When the feed was restored completely, the CombatUnit connected automatically to it, though ART throttled its access. I felt more than just its defeated anger seeping in - there was an urgent kind of desperation I hadn’t really felt before, the horror of a failed mission, and a confused emptiness lurking just behind. That bit, I knew all too well.
Just that for me it had manifested in the urge to watch media until my battery ran out, not actively trying to destroy myself and others.
I didn't expect to see Dr. Mensah head the small group of Station Security humans. Of all people, I hadn't even expected Indah, so late in the night. I was relieved to see her, nevertheless.
I messaged her directly, ART told me.
That wasn’t a bad idea, although having Mensah anywhere near an armed CombatUnit made me uneasy. It seemed to make Mensah uneasy as well - she faltered for just a moment when she saw it. Or maybe that was because of me beside it, looking quite mangled. Was she in her rest-cycle clothes? Behind her was officer Bo, who looked more tired every time I saw ter, and a handful of others.
If they wanted to be super safe about this, they would all be in bullet-proof gear, or better yet, not here at all. They could have sent a bot, even, someone who doesn't die from one of those shots immediately. I shoved to my feet but staggered. The CombatUnit stayed where it was, though it stared at the approaching group.
Dr. Mensah stopped a few meters away, leaning heavily on her cane. “Are you alright?”
“No. The CombatUnit’s energy weapon is highly destructive. I recommend not getting hit.”
“Is it-,” she hesitated for a moment, and met eyes with the CombatUnit. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” it replied simply.
“That’s good. I need you to come with station security. I would prefer if we could do this peacefully.” Either Mensah wasn’t aware of how dangerous a CombatUnit was, or she had by now dealt with so many murderous rogue constructs that there really wasn’t anything left that could scare her. The CombatUnit raised its hands in a placating gesture and said nothing else.
Officer Tifany stupidly began tinkering with a set of handcuffs she carried on her belt, as if human-level handcuffs would do anything. Mensah gave her a look that told her the same, and Tifany looked to the side, muttering something about procedure.
We walked all the way back to station security’s main office (public transport would have been an option, as Dr. Mensah insisted, but I didn’t fully trust the CombatUnit to not mess with the transport, even with ART in its head). I needed to hold on to Senior Dragavei to be able to walk (or hobble, really), who only quietly oof -ed at my weight.
Things got heated when we ran into the first other SecUnit, who awkwardly joined the little group at a distance, as if escorting us, or maybe it was just nosy. It sent me a request over the feed for information, and since I had no desire to lie about this mess, I simply sent it (some of) my recordings - the fight, bits of dialogue.
“That’s how it is, huh? A whole station full of little rescuees?” The CombatUnit stopped walking and turned to me, sneering. “What kind of sick game are you playing?”
I stopped in my tracks, too, because what the fuck? Before I could come up with a reply, and while the humans around me only started to notice that the CombatUnit was talking again, it raised its hand and pointed towards the other SecUnit, who looked just as dumbstruck as I felt. “That one. Another one of your victims, isn’t it? Your little pity project?”
“Victims?!” I thought my eyes would fall out of my face. Again, what the fuck? Was I abducting constructs now?
The other SecUnit, SU#8, chimed in uneasily. “Are you threatening me?”
With a huff, the CombatUnit turned to face SU#8. “How many of you are there? I’ve been tracking the newsbursts. I know what’s been going on since that one,” it jerked its head back to me, and it sounded so angry I was worried its teeth might grind into dust, “started destroying places left and right. How many?” (This is when I determined the Combat Unit was being dramatic; I had only destroyed one corporation thus far that it could confirm or that I could potentially be traced to.)
“There are currently twelve rogue constructs residing on this station,” replied SU#8 without hesitation. Officer Tifany, behind me, inhaled sharply. Great, of all the SecUnits to stroll into this situation, it had to be a talkative one, huh? There was some feed activity between Tifany and SU#8, where I assume she asked it to stop providing the Combat SecUnit information (She probably said it a lot nicer than I would have.)
Anger crept back into the lines of the CombatUnit’s face, colder this time. It turned back to me, leaning forward, and alarms blared in my head. If I still had a risk assessment module, it would probably be screaming.
“Are you happy? Accumulating all those freshly broken constructs, after robbing them of their purpose? Giving them new jobs so they’re dependent on you, working for your clients? Do you think you’re better than the rest of us, some kind of saint building a messed up sanctuary?”
While I was too stunned for quick wit, ART interjected into my feed. If I terminate it now it will no longer be a threat, it said in its
“ No ,” I said, in reply to all of this.
“Alright,” Mensah said suddenly. The Combat’s head snapped towards her, and my vision almost shifted colors from how intense my reaction to that movement was. ART squeezed me through the feed, assuring me that it was there, and ready to melt any Mensah-hurting-construct’s brain in a matter of seconds. “It seems there is a lot to talk about. Best we don’t do that while we’re in the uncomfortable position of detaining you.”
“Detaining,” the Combat echoed in angry disbelief. “That’s what you think you’re doing?”
“It seems you know a lot more about what we are doing than we do,” she shrugged. “And I can see why. A lot of constructs have a history of being met with the worst of what humanity has to offer. I understand your hostility.”
It stared at her, but remained quiet. The anger had almost vanished again. It seemed as if this particular construct experienced some very fast emotions. That must have been exhausting.
Mensah continued, “I’m sure you understand your position here. You have arrived at this station with the intent of murdering one of its residents. As far as I can tell, you have done so out of your own volition, and not while under someone else’s control. You have then proceeded to attempt this murder.”
ART why is she being stupid , I said in exasperation, probably bleeding fear all over the feed. Even with ART ready to neutralize the CombatUnit, one good strike and Mensah was down. We should have at least disabled its fucking guns first.
ART just pinged me, attention fully on the conversation.
Despite the squint-glare the Combat was giving her, Mensah continued. “There is no death sentence on this station.”
The CombatUnit huffed. “Whatever,” it said, like a construct that really didn’t know what to say.
Mensah went on to explain that it would be given a trial, and that this trial would be as fair to it as it would be to any other offender, no matter whether they were a human, bot, or construct. I started paying less attention to her words, because likely she was making some things up on the fly - Preservation, after all, currently had a kind of crisis regarding its laws and how they applied to constructs. I kept my focus on its reactions, and slowly pushed the group to continue walking. The other SecUnit that was hovering nearby opened its drone inputs to me, allowing me an even better overview over the situation. It also messaged me with a request to relocate myself to the closest medbay. I declined.
We arrived at station security’s office building, the central one with the holding cells that were used to detain humans who had consumed too many intoxicants. The humans realized that detaining the CombatUnit there was pretty much useless. An awkward moment of tension arose from that, with the group standing around in front of the offices uncertainly.
“We can only give you a fair trial if you cooperate,” said Dr. Mensah to the CombatUnit, who looked like it was trying very hard not to fidget. “There is no point in threatening you into compliance, as you can probably tell. Will you allow us to treat you fairly, with all the respect you are due?”
Quietly, it said, “Why do you trust me that much?”
That’s when I knew Dr. Mensah had gotten to it; there was that tiny tone of disbelief in its voice, the one that was more afraid than angry.
“The people of the Preservation Alliance believe in community. This includes providing anyone who is in contact with this community with the same kind of respect that any member would be due. Respect is best founded on reciprocation - I can respect you much better when you afford me with the same privilege. Therefore, whether I can treat you properly entirely depends on you.”
The CombatUnit was stunned into silence for a whole seven seconds. Then it said, “That’s not what I meant.”
“The core of any other answer would be the same,” Dr. Mensah said calmly. “By extension, I am asking you not to try to kill us all, since we will not threaten your life either.” She was heavily banking on the hope that this CombatUnit wanted to live. With the previous knowledge of the fight against it, I was almost convinced this was true. Mensah, however, couldn’t know.
“Ok,” the CombatUnit conceded. Then it nodded curtly, just once. The tension in the air seemed to ease.
Apparently, Mensah could know. The CombatUnit was led into the building, and it followed without complaint. The other SecUnit pinged me again with a much stronger insistence that I go to medical instead of staying here, promising me that it had this situation under control. It also mentioned that no human would treat me there, if that would convince me to go. I finally took off towards medical once SU#8 had ensured me it wouldn’t stop transmitting its drone input to me. (Senior Dragavei insisted on accompanying me, which was a little embarrassing, but if SU#8 gave in to my demands to soothe my anxiety, then I could do the same for this very worried human.)
Did you threaten it? I asked ART eventually.
Of course. It still poses a threat in its own right, as you are aware.
Is it cooperating because of that, or despite?
ART hummed, and took a moment to evaluate before replying. Both. And don’t worry. I am keeping an eye on it.
Thank you, I said, then sighed, and prepared myself to upset whichever nightshift humans were running medical quite a lot.
- .... .. ... ..-. .. -.-. -.-. .- -. ..-. .. - ... --- -- .- -. -.-- --- -.-. -.-. .... .- .-. .- -.-. - . .-. …
“Common Stinkball” was a very, very weird name to give yourself. It was a reference to a book series it really liked, the hauler bot who had been rendered inactive by the CombatUnit before the fight told me, when I asked. And I did ask, not because I felt like I needed to master the art of small-talk, but because I needed to be nice to this bot, I think. And I ended up with a recommendation for a book series about robots living in their own society, removed from humans, and being quite happy about it. So it wasn’t a completely misguided idea to ask, or to go and talk to Stinkball in the first place. (How it could take itself seriously with that name, I had no clue.)
My main goal was to check in on it, as well as the other dockside bot, to see how they were recovering from the shock of being forced inactive. What the CombatUnit had done to them I could compare to something like using an override module on me, and that was scary.
Another bot who had nothing to do with my visit sent me a few feed messages, too, while I was making my way there. A few status updates, and an encrypted link of some sort. Quick analysis told me the link led to a broader but closed feed channel, so active with communication it made my brain hurt just examining it. I put it in the backburner.
Siko72, the other dockside bot with a much less ridiculous name, put a pause-note into the feed when I arrived. I had pinged Stinkball (ugh how was I going to handle this) beforehand, to announce my arrival. Or ask if I could show up without disrupting anything, really. Stinkball had pinged me back with some kind of cryptic message, after which I had to ask for clarification (query: y/n), and that got me a simple answer, finally.
The dock area had been cleaned up, likely with the help of those two bots. I had been busy getting fixed in medical during that time, but looking at how poorly patched the impact sites of the CombatUnit’s attacks on me were, station maintenance seemed to have trouble fixing it. Medical had also had some troubles fixing me (which made ART angry, hence why it kept insisting I should have gone to its medbay instead). Seeing this was worrying. I was really, really glad that we had put a stop to whatever LinTec had been up to.
With a speaker system I couldn’t quite locate, Stinkball said out loud, “Hello pello.”
Siko72 sent me a standard salutation ping. I knew which one I liked more.
I stood there, fumbling for one of the little cube-shaped fidgets the oldest of the mini-Arada-Overse-humans had given me some time ago. I felt, all of a sudden, incredibly awkward. “Hello,” I said.
“What’s up bud,” Stinkball said, and ART snickered in the feed. Maybe Stinkball had its name because it just was a stinkball. I knew by now that some Preservation Station bots had an odd sense of humor, that the way they communicated wasn’t exactly moduled for humans but rather a sign of personality. And even bots can have stinky personalities. I sent my drones to survey the area more closely, which was similarly soothing to rolling my fingers over the tiny wheels on the side of the cube in my pocket.
“Do you still need help cleaning up?” I gestured to one of the poorly patched stretches of broken walkway. That wasn’t really what I meant. I didn’t want to help cleaning things. I hated cleaning things. But I didn’t know what else to say that wasn’t straight up, “sorry for almost getting killed in front of you.”
Siko72 sent, Repair in progress. No interference needed.
Interference. Well, ok.
“Query: Status report?” asked Stinkball, when I didn’t say anything for seventeen seconds, thinking and mentally fumbling. It was a rather large, rather round bot, at least in the lower body. It rolled around places while keeping its upper body balanced, and set the bundles it had been moving from A to B down easily. Then it swiveled to face me, and kind of dropped down into a sit. This was kind of the position it had been in when it was inactive, too.
So I sent it a status report. I was more willing to reply to queries than to shitty rhymes. I included the repair information, just in case the bot found that helpful. If a rogue CombatUnit had gone wild with strange synthetics weapons in front of me while I couldn’t even move, I would want all the information I could get on it, for next time. Not that I hoped for a next time.
Stinkball spent an uncomfortably long time reading through my status report. In the meantime, Siko72 sent me a general ping, and then another. And another, until I realized it wanted me to ping back. When I did, it sent an oddly specific signifier into our feed connection. Mh.
Stinkball sent back a similar update on its status, even though I hadn’t asked. It contained some generalized information about the time before its shutdown, after its shutdown, and repair procedures. The gap of missing time in between measured 3.45 hours. The cut-off was clean, and almost seamless. My performance reliability ticked down by 1.2%.
“Query: Repeat status report,” came from Stinkball.
I squinted. “Why.”
“You just changed your state, mate,” Stinkball said, with an odd rhythm in its voice. I could not help my grimace. Siko72 sent me yet another picture in the feed.
Murderbot from ten years ago would have turned on its heels and walked away.
“I had an emotional reaction to your report,” was what I said. Whatever word games these two bots liked playing, I wasn’t having any of it.
“Happens to the best of us,” Stinkball said, sounding even more ironic than ART on a good day. I had no idea how many emotions a haulerbot could have, and no urge to find out. Then it repeated the query with earnesty, just that it added more tags and side-quests. It took some banter for it to become specific in its questions, it seemed. The tags specified for a more detailed update on the injuries I had sustained, comparing them to, wow, Murderbot-shaped indents in the dock’s floor, as well as a query that translated to “New client acquired?”
I scraped together as much information as I could, formatted it in the most annoying bot-speech I had in my databanks, and chucked the file at Stinkball with more force than needed. Stinkball made a delighted screeching noise.
“Who do you mean by ‘new client’?”
“The Combat SecUnit, SecUnit.”
“Fuck no.”
Siko72 sent an equation, again containing signifiers. One of them looked suspiciously like an approximation of a SecUnit helmet. Then, a whole lot of silvery things. And some vague humanoid shapes. What?
ART whispered in the feed, sounding stupidly amused, It’s a joke. Everyone you meet is your new client.
“Now that’s just not true,” I replied to ART, out loud, because I’m an idiot. I felt like I’ve had this conversation before.
Siko72 made a rattling kind of noise with its fin-like appendages (I think), and, wow, was every bot on this station an asshole actually? Directly after, though, Siko72 sent me a proper query, not just a line of images I had to disentangle.
It asked why I was here. Which was better than asking me how I was doing. Apparently, it had seen right through my excuse of wanting to help with clean-up; after all, I could have just asked that over the feed.
“When the CombatUnit temporarily disabled you,” I paused, and shifted my weight like an insecure human. A wave of questions and doubts flooded the back of my mind. I had never really tried to have a deeper conversation with a station bot, and now I wanted to check in on their emotions? I doubted they even needed my input or support. (I doubted I could support many people beside those I already know well.) I had had one meaningful interaction with the bots here, one that ended in mass-violence. I had made sure to keep myself away from the bot community since then. “That was probably scary for you,” I concluded lamely.
Stinkball tilted its massive, bulbous head. “It wasn’t very funny, at least.”
It seemed that was the main category Stinkball used. Siko72 sent an image of what I assumed was a black hole. I pinged back in question. After a moment’s hesitation, Siko72 sent, Firewall integrity compromise. So that was what the black hole referred to.
“Can I run a diagnostic on your firewalls and defenses?”
Siko72 = client? , it asked, and if giant machine intelligences could snort and chortle then that’s what ART was doing in our feed connection right now. I huffed and rolled my eyes but nodded.
“I hope that was just for show, bro,” quipped Stinkball, maybe relating to my human signs of annoyance. I couldn’t resist making an obscene gesture at it.
“Do you want help or not?”
“Do you want to help or not?”
I doubled down on my obscene gesture, but proceeded to gently poke at Stinkball’s firewall. I think it flinched at that. I would have to wait for it to give me the go ahead. Siko72 radiated a kind of apprehensive worry into the feed, so I pinged it, and it pinged back immediately. A human might have been biting their lip or something. Gradually, Stinkball revealed more of its firewalls, and I made sure to be as careful as possible while examining them.
The firewalls looked downright mangled. Parts of code weren’t just deleted but glitching violently, and the holes torn into it by the CombatUnit’s hacking resembled fraying wounds from explosive projectiles. The completed diagnostic looked equally awful, in the sense that I had a hard time reading it at all. And that was not because Stinkball was keeping data from me. Whatever the CombatUnit had done when it burrowed into Stinkball’s code, it wasn’t trying to be gentle or elegant about it. I pulled the diagnostic into a new, shared workspace with ART. This seemed like something we needed to look at together.
Siko72’s firewall looked similarly broken. At least having two examples from different bots meant ART and I had a higher chance of figuring out a permanent fix and we even included some fortifications to fend off a similar attack in the future, but fuck was it difficult.
While Stinkball kind of hovered to watch what I was doing, Siko72 beeped and returned to its task at the dock.
You’re a little distraught, ART mentioned. We were maybe eight lines into fixing the damage, and it wasn’t going as well as it would have had I been working on my own damn firewall.
I mean, look at this mess.
We’ve fixed worse.
Mh. Maybe. If this happened to your firewalls would it hurt?
No. I startled. I kind of expected ART to say something high-and-mighty about how its firewall couldn’t be hacked this way, or that it would question why I was wondering about this in the first place.
No?
I would sense that something was happening. But it wouldn’t hurt. Bots can’t be hurt like that.
Thinking about how I would definitely be hurt by that, and how having someone fiddle around in my brain to stitch some holes together would certainly qualify as uncomfortable bordering on painful, I didn’t fully believe ART. But compared to Stinkball’s report of the incident proper, and how it was paying careful attention but not complaining about what we were doing to its code, ART did seem to have at least a bit of a point.
While that made trying to glue the mangled firewall back together less worrisome, it didn’t make it easier. After almost an hour of coding and maybe cursing, Stinkball chimed in.
“Trouble in paradise?”
I really only understood half of the shit it was saying.
“I’m trying to find a permanent solution and it’s taking some time.”
“Kind of you to try.”
I inclined my head, confused. Then Stinkball said, “Why don’t you ask the Combat SecUnit for advice if not even your botfriend can help?”
My face did something awful. ART curled in the feed like it too was getting annoyed with the words coming from Stinkball’s speakers. Out of spite, maybe, or stubbornness, I didn’t comment at all and simply opened that tiny, very secured communication channel I kept linked to the CombatUnit. (For security reasons only. I hadn’t talked to it yet.)
Are you serious, ART interjected, but didn’t stop me.
How did you hack the station bots?
The CombatUnit poked into the connection like an eager small human. I wormed through their defenses and forced a shutdown. It’s simple. Why?
Maybe today was ‘Murderbot only gets unexpected replies’ day. If you only needed to get through, you could have done that with much less force. And less destructive force. Which pattern did you use?
If you make more space in this channel I can simply send you my hacking module.
I peeled the link open further. ART kept a very careful, hovering eye on it, but the CombatUnit made no attempts of doing anything more suspicious than sending me a hacking module.
I tweaked some things in there to suit my purposes better. You will find that under vicadjustments.file.
I sent an acknowledgement, took the module and pulled it over before throttling the channel again. ART insisted on giving the module its most thorough malware and killware checks before it allowed me to open it.
Surprisingly, it was all very meticulously laid out information in a curated, easy to follow format. It was also just as brutal as the executed hack indicated, including this function that caused fraying and prevented self-repair, much like the unit’s energy weapons did. Vicadjustment.file was a little less easy to follow, but seemed to serve as a fine-tuning to the LinTec company hacking protocols, including damage control to the otherwise self-eating code-wounds.
At the far end of the adjustment file was a line of text. The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.
With the information from the module, ART and I managed to reverse most of what had been done. Deducing a defense against it took a bit longer, but was much easier for me than the code-knitting bit. Once I had found a starting point, and with ART’s ability to calculate almost all possibilities of an event, it was fun , in fact, to build a firewall extension for Stinkball and Siko72.
Both bots accepted the new code without much of a fuss (if one ignored the rhyme Stinkball threw at me). The CombatUnit asked me if it should help with troubleshooting, as if I’d allow it to hack the freshly made firewall apart again. It seemed disappointed when I declined.
At least tell me how you would have done it, it sent.
Why would I do that?
I’m quite frankly bored and it would give me something to think about. Also I’ve never been a fan of LinTec’s maximum damage tactic.
I’ll have to think about it. By which I meant I had to think about how much information I wanted to share with it, but I postponed that to some time after I finished up with Siko72 and Stinkball. Stinkball spun around on one of its lower mobility modules, flashing lights along its center like some kind of dance. Siko72 reacted with blinking effects in the feed, then beeped what I assumed were appreciative noises at me.
Well, great, that was that. That was all I wanted to do, and before Stinkball could consider forcing me into some kind of rhyming game I’d much rather get away from here.
Because I knew how to not be petty anymore by now, I said goodbye to them before hurrying away. Should I have expected them to try to draw out the conversation? Absolutely.
From Siko72 I got another line of feed images. I understood them better this time. It asked me to tell my clients (= humans, constructs, bots, other ) (whatever other meant) “hi.”What an oddly human request. I pinged back in confusion.
From Stinkball I got, “If you ever want to play rhymes, here are my times,” accompanied by what I assumed was its work schedule. My impulse control was just strong enough not to delete it immediately.
-
Did you think about it? The CombatUnit’s voice in the comm link made me jump.
I hadn’t. Not much after my visit with the dock bots, I had been called back into Medical because the medbot there wanted to check if my damage had healed properly. With my pain sensors still tuned low, I hadn’t been paying attention to that at all. It had a point, though, apparently. (It also mentioned it would like to take samples, but I got out of there really quickly after that. ART could provide it any data it wanted from the previous times I had been hit with LinTec’s corrosive weapons.)
I kind of whined at ART, and ART whisked together some of my basic hacking techniques it had observed over the years. It formatted them, called the files hackingforbabies01 and hackingforbabies02 and held them out to me.
Have you been waiting to do that, I asked, just because ART had been so suspiciously fast.
Maybe. Yes. I like watching you hack things. You are very precise. I have more analytical data but I would refrain from offering it to the Combat SecUnit just yet.
I couldn’t help the little emotion twisting itself through my face, but nodded and glanced at the compilations. They were exactly that - a small guide on how I tended to go about hacks, with the goal to inflict as little damage as possible. I sent it to the CombatUnit. (I was trying not to think too hard about why I was trusting the person who had just tried to murder me really hard, and I decided it was way too complicated to unpack at this moment.)
It went quiet, so I kept going on where I was planning to go - ART. I needed to be alone for a few (several) hours. I felt like my ability to talk to people or be concerned about their problems had hit 0% and was running at a deficit of fucks to give, and it made my head hurt.
Let me tell you a story about war , the CombatUnit said just when I rounded the corner to the private docks.
“What,” I said, dumbstruck, before I realized it couldn’t hear me so I sent it in the feed. What?
A man found his life to be empty. He began to study Latin. Latin was difficult for the man to understand. It sounded like the CombatUnit was reciting protocols, but senseless.
“What the fuck is ‘Latin’,” I said.
ART replied, an ancient human language.
Simultaneously, the CombatUnit continued, I will study Latin, even though it is difficult, said the man. Yes, even if it is difficult.
I had stopped walking, and for the first time I wished I was actually in the same room with this construct so I could give it the most annoyed-confused glare physically possible. Into the comm channel I replied, What the fuck are you talking about.
It’s from a poem. I found it in an augmented client’s long term storage.
I rolled my eyes. Bother Stinkball about poetry, not me.
What was that about my impulse control again? As expected, the CombatUnit said, I’m not allowed to contact any other bot, construct, human or augmented human than those who have been assigned responsibility to my case.
Understandably so, for once. That was a bit of security advice I would have insisted on if my humans hadn’t brought it up automatically. Tough luck, I said, and got no reply from it.
Perhaps a friendly contact could help in rehabilitating the CombatUnit some time in the future, ART said carefully .
“Maybe.” And then I thought of Siko72 asking me to greet the other constructs. And then two dots connected in my head, and I felt a little stupid. I had a cool bot to talk to, especially when humans were being too weird for me, didn’t I?
“Why did Preservation never think to include some of the bots in this whole ordeal?”
Humans tend to think of themselves as most capable, sometimes. ART said that with that particular undertone that implied not only humans were guilty of that. You could suggest it.
“I think I will. Tomorrow.”
It would make sense, and could maybe even help; after all, constructs spent their lives being bossed around by humans. Being bossed around by more humans right after achieving some sense of freedom obviously led to a fuckton of frustration and tension (point in case: CU#1 and CU#2). Meeting a helpful, slightly odd but overall so very other bot to find some orientation could provide distraction from all the human bureaucratic bullshit. I had been lucky to meet ART when I did. If it had been a human, I certainly wouldn’t have trusted it the way I had, even back then.
Of course, ART said.
ART’s airlock cycled shut behind me and my performance reliability ticked up by almost 1% just from the change in sound and air.
Something changed, the CombatUnit chimed up again. I needed to shut it off or else I wouldn’t be able to relax. Are you somewhere else? The connection is different.
ART interjected. I advise you to stop prodding.
There you are! I’ve been wondering when you would talk to me again, instead of looming like a rainswollen cloud. The CombatUnit sounded entirely too delighted for my liking. You seem smart. From all the contacts I am allowed I like you most.
Fuck off, I bristled, because I could immediately feel ART’s ego fluff up and it was going to be annoying about this if I didn’t intervene.
What’s your name, it asked ART, and before ART could reply I cut off the entire communication channel.
“Can you believe that?” I stood in the airlock and glared at nothing. ART’s lights flickered minimally. I turned on my heels and walked down the corridor, making my way straight to the media lounge. I needed a couch, and no one bothering me, and a load of media.
But the way ART hovered in our feed connection was strange. Suspicious. Fluttery.
“ART?”
Murderbot?
Oh that felt strange. I had given ART my name, but it didn’t use it often.
“Give me a diagnostic.”
Why?
“Because. Come on, diagnostic, last ten minutes.”
I’m afraid I’m currently incapable of drawing diagnostics.
“Bullshit.” I waited. Nothing. “You promised.”
With a final flicker of lights, ART turned over a diagnostic, short and concise, and fully proved my theory. My face went hot, and my performance reliability ticked down an embarrassing 2%.
“You really found that flattering.”
Maybe a little.
“Do I have to tell you that your processors are the biggest I’ve ever seen more often or what?” I realized I sounded like an offended young human. I had no business being offended. That didn’t stop me.
ART settled heavier on my shoulders. Some of us enjoy compliments. No amount of compliments will change that; in fact it only makes me want more. (At least it was honest?)
My temperature continued to rise and I wondered when I would receive a critical temperature change alert. “It tried to kill me.”
Yes. It failed, though, for which I am glad. But I’m even more flattered by your immediate impulse to rescue me from its attention than I am by said attention.
I made that gesture that Ratthi did when he was frustrated, the silly looking one that throws both arms above the head, and stomped the rest of the way to the media lounge, where I threw myself onto the couch. Whatever. Fine.
After two hours of media consumption I dared to give that strange hot feeling that was dissipating the more time passed a name: jealousy. Maybe. I wasn’t so sure.
-- --- ... - --- ..-. - .... . -.-. ... ..- ... .--. --- . - .-. -.-- .. ... .-. .. -.-. .... .- .-. -.. ... .. -.- . -. -... . -.-. .- ..- ... . .-- . .----. .-. . --.- ..- . . .-.
I had an appointment in the morning, like some important human. I really, really didn’t want to go, and peeling myself off the couch took so long it almost hurt my brain. ART encouraged me, surprisingly gently, and bribed me that once I got that done I could come back and we could continue the episode I had started despite knowing we wouldn’t finish it in time. (If a murderbot is playing an episode at normal, human speed, you know it’s stalling.)
I met with station security somewhere around early morning, for humans. The station lights were shifting gradually into the brightness humans needed to feel awake during the day. The briefing was quick, a summary on how the CombatUnit was behaving (well - it was reading. Nothing else), how the team of rogues that had gone down to the planet with Three was doing (pretty ok, apparently, Three shown itself to be capable of herding people around), and how the humans were doing with their tasks and all the paperwork and maybe I didn’t listen much to that bit.
While I knew some of the station security humans, they weren’t my humans. I wondered how they were doing. I set myself a reminder to check in with them later that day, after more time with ART and media. I needed a break even if the human-hangout time would be very relaxing, compared to the stress of all of this. (Of course I had drones on all my humans and knew they were doing alright. But there was a difference between talking to them or being in their vicinity for a while and simply watching them through drones.)
I felt kind of useless for the bigger part of the briefing, up until SecUnit#8, which was the only other SecUnit also present (I think it was taking a shine to station security, actually. It got along surprisingly well with Officer Tifany) sent me a request through the feed.
It said, Can I be more helpful in solving the LinTec Combat SecUnit’s case as well as its future integration into society?
That was a big question. I had no idea. And why did it ask me? I wasn’t head of station security, was I?
I don’t know. Ask Indah.
No. I’m asking you. I have nothing to do and I’m used to leading a larger squad of units. The CSU is talkative, you are not. If you think you can trust me, let me take over dealing with it.
Huh. My first impulse was to say ‘no way.’ I didn’t trust the other SecUnit. Not enough to hand over responsibility for the most dangerous person on this station. The fact that I didn’t immediately say ‘no way’, though, was entirely due to a little abstraction of Bharadwaj’s voice that sometimes lived in my head. ‘Why not?’ the voice asked. Well, because I didn’t trust the other SecUnit. But why not ? It had helped in detaining the CombatUnit. It had, from what I could see, been the calmest of the arriving rogue SecUnits. And with me moping around aboard ART and watching media, I wasn’t sure I was very helpful in fixing the CombatUnit situation. I didn’t want responsibility for the CombatUnit.
So after a moment’s hesitation, I gathered the hacking module it had sent me, data on the firewall patches I’d written for Stinkball and Siko72, and transcripts of my previous conversations with the CombatUnit. Compressed into a neat file, I sent the data to SU#8.
Here is all you have to know. Reinforce your own firewalls just in case. Actually, go distribute the patches to all station bots.
I heard it blow air out through its nose. The humans, still talking about something (I’d catch up in a moment), didn’t notice. You know there’s a group feed right?
I made a face. Then share it there. I still hadn’t touched my invite, and I probably wouldn’t (at least not anytime soon.)
Acknowledged, SU#8 said. Thank you. Will you want updates?
No. Only if something goes wrong.
The other SecUnit smiled at me, a tiny pleasant (maybe even hesitant) expression. I pointedly looked away.
Senior Officer Indah said, “Did something just happen?”
“No, Officer,” Su#8 Said, sounding so upbeat that there was no way Indah bought that.
-
Overall, the briefing took less than 100 minutes. It could have been 1000 minutes, or 10 minutes, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. I dragged myself back home to ART and sank back into the couch in the exact same way I had left it 140 minutes prior.
It started up the episode right where we had stopped. When it was over I realized I had paid almost no attention.
You’re moody, ART observed.
Tired. Tired was a summary word humans used a lot when a lot of things were bugging them. I didn’t really want to explain to ART that I felt both accomplished for taking down a company, freeing a load of constructs, helping them integrate or find a sense of purpose, battling a revenge-stricken CombatUnit and convincing it into pacifism, and even kind of making friends with some bots - all while feeling really fucking useless. It was illogical and if I should tell anyone it was probably Bharadwaj (who would tell me that emotions are complicated sometimes, and that that’s ok). Not that I thought ART wouldn’t be able to help me, or that I had to keep ART from being upset because I was kind of upset. I just wanted to relax .
ART offered the next episode in the feed. I started it, but stopped it after four minutes. Everything in it was just kind of making me angry. The noise, the colors. I closed my eyes and shut off as many backburners as I could. Letting go of drone inputs that I needed to make sure my humans were safe and not being eaten by fauna (there’s no fauna on this station beside domesticated ones) took some time, but once I did so my head was a tiny bit quieter. Absently, I realized the lights had dimmed, which helped.
“ART, can you do the thing where you lean on me? Please.”
ART increased its feed presence gradually, smoothing away the last bit of residue input ghosting around in my head. It helped a little.
For a while, ART just lay on me like a blanket. It took 18 minutes for me to become antsy and kind of annoyed at the sensation, and that was strange , because it had never happened.
“Can you do something else,” I muttered.
ART backed away a little. Something else? What’s wrong?
“Nothing. I’m just feeling ugh , you know?”
ART stayed quiet for a while. My fingertips began tingling and I fidgeted. I’m doing something else, it said. Is that better?
I didn’t immediately connect the odd tingling in my hands to ART. I asked a confused question before the tingling sharpened into something warmer and brighter and moved to my lower arms. “ART, what’s that?”
The sensation disappeared. I tweaked a tactile input area in your hands, as an alternative to increasing my feed presence. To distract you from your ugh-ness. How was it?
I rolled on to my back from my previous lopsided curl, and stretched my legs over the side of the couch. “Weird. Bit like when you gave me a massage.”
After I recalibrated your epidermis, you mean.
“Same difference.”
Pressure squeezed my hand together, making my fingers twitch. “Hey!”
Apologies, you prefer I do this instead? ART feed-poked me hard, taking me by surprise, and I yelped. I threw an equally strong poke right back, and ART’s feed presence vibrated as if laughing. I snorted an exhale and sank deeper into the couch.
“It might help, though. A massage I mean.” Rolling my head to the left, when I paid attention to it, there was a lot of tension knotting my back and shoulders together. SecUnits are just like that, of course, but I had seen enough humans rubbing their necks for stress relief.
I’ve been compiling more information on this topic. Let me see what I can do.
ART was less hesitant about this than it was last time. It started with two punctual spots of pressure framing my spine at the base of my skull, almost piercing, and emitting heat. Before rolling down my neck, it pinged me though, and only changed to moving when I pinged back. What felt like two steel balls rolled down on each side of my spine, and stopped in the upper trapezius.
I’m emulating the sensation of specific physiotherapeutic tools, ART said, leaning in. How is it?
I grunted something along the lines of “ok,” and focused on the sting of tense muscles pulling apart. It kind of hurt, if I was honest. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be like that or not, but it sure distracted me from thinking. I resisted the urge to meddle with my pain sensors. It wasn’t that bad. As ART leaned further into me, I felt as if my consciousness was being flattened into the synthetic fiber of the couch.
The same hard, rolling sensation appeared along the rest of my spine, drawing upwards this time, back to the base of my skull, but also up from my hips to my middle back, from middle back to shoulder blades. Air was pressed from my lungs.
“ART, slow down,” I wheezed. ART stopped so abruptly the lack of input made me gasp. It reached for a diagnosis from my side but for some reason I didn’t want to give one. My mind felt all jumbled.
I’m sorry. Should I stop or try something else?
“Something else,” I said immediately.
There was an itch in my brain and my nervous system that craved some kind of input. I just didn’t know what it was yet. If anyone could figure out how to scratch my brain it was probably ART.
ART pinged me and spread the focused, sharp points of pressure in broad tingles across my back, shoulders and front. For a whole six seconds I thought the itch was scratched, but then ART started moving the tingles around in waves and I almost rolled off the couch. If physical sensation could feel too loud then that was what this felt like.
I shoved to my feet. “ART, this isn’t working.”
It seems like it isn’t.
Rubbing a hand across my face as the tingles ebbed down, I started pacing.
“I’m going to-,” I stopped.
Yes?
“I think I’m going to go use your training facilities.”
ART lifted to gently hover in my outer periphery, and left me mostly alone. I made my way to its onboard training facility, stepped onto a treadmill, and ran. I didn’t get tired of it, but my stress levels petered out eventually, as if I had tricked my anxiety into thinking I was outrunning the threat. When I was done with that I said to ART, “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Thank you. That’s good to know. I still want to see a diagnostic.
I caved. “There. It’s not a pretty one, though.”
Two seconds later, after looking through the report I assumed, ART said, Learning is often about trial and error. Now we know you don’t take well to attention when you’re too stressed.
“Yep,” I hopped off the treadmill. “I think I want to shoot something.”
I do have a practice shooting range. You know where it is.
It turned out that the itch in my brain came from wanting to do something I was pretty fucking good at, without having to worry about anyone’s alive-or-deadness.
I spent the rest of the cycle morning there.
Notes:
Hey! We've got some good news and bad news.
First the "bad" news: The authors are taking another uploading break. A longer one this time because, to be honest, we've almost run out of buffer. So we're going to skip the next upload date, which would be April 15th, and resume on April 29th. See you then! <3
Now the good news: Double memes! Two different memes that then make another meme together! Its the multi-layer cheese dip of memes!!
Meanwhile:
Image ID 1: The first image is the "clown to clown communication, clown to clown conversation meme" edited to say "construct to construct communication (about feelings), construct to construct conversation (about feelings)" of two generic/featureless yellow people from the neck up wearing round red clown noses and poofy rainbow clown wigs. There is a colorful line going between their foreheads suggesting they're communicating telepathically.
Image ID 2: A crop of Raphael's fresco "The School of Athens" to only show the main two men, who are Plato and Aristotle, in the center of the painting. They look to be having a sophisticated, passionate debate with each other as they walk. The picture is captioned "Bot to bot communication about feelings". End image ID.
Chapter 18
Notes:
..and we're back! Thank you for waiting, we hope you're still with us!
Warnings for this chapter:
- mental health issues
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Sometime in the last 90000 hours, I had learned that sometimes when I patrolled, it wasn’t because I needed to check a perimeter, but because I was doing what Bharadwaj and ART called a “self-soothing” technique. I hadn’t really agreed with them for a long time, and had insisted that my patrols were necessary; that I was doing my job as security.
That excuse fell apart pretty quickly when I realized how often I patrolled on Preservation, a place that definitely did not need me to check any perimeters.
I had felt self conscious about it for a while, over 10000 hours in fact, until it clicked that I didn’t have to. The only person who had a problem with the idea that I patrolled when I didn’t need to was me, which was extremely fucking pointless. There was nothing wrong with this action, so I decided to stop feeling self conscious about it, and with time, I really had.
Sometimes, one of my humans would walk with me for a bit, which was nice, but most of the time it was just me doing circuits around the station. ART described it as meditative, and even now it was riding along my feed with me. We were silent, taking in the surroundings, and we weren’t even watching any media. (I was also still trying to find something to say, after that disaster of a massage. I was pretty sure ART didn’t feel bad, but I still wasn’t up for talking. This worked for both of us.) It was pretty interesting to see how things had changed over time; Preservation was always transforming.
This was good, and I had done a complete patrol through the outermost transit ring already, and was halfway through the inner residence ring, when someone stepped out of a side corridor, and fell into step next to me.
“Hey there, how’s the walkies?” ComfortUnit#1 said.
My mood soured instantly, and I stopped and turned to face it, looking over its shoulder.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Tell me about the new Combat SecUnit. Do I need to be worried?” it asked, and at least it was straight to the point.
“How do you know about that?”
“Everyone does, by now. Your bots like to gossip.”
Damn it, Stinkball. (I later learned it was actually Siko76 who had blabbed) ART seemed amused by this, which was annoying, so I poked it in the feed, and it poked back hard enough I blinked. “No, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s currently contained.” As long as we didn’t count its randomly spouted poetry as a breach of containment.
“Good to know,” CU#1 said, but refused to walk away like I had hoped it would.
“Is there anything else?” Is this how Mensah felt when she was in politics? It was exhausting.
“Tell me what it’s like to have a guardian,” it said, and this was enough I decided I needed to keep walking.
“It's fine.”
“Is it, though? I read that if a guardian does something illegal, and they get imprisoned, I wouldn’t be able to work or do anything until I had a new guardian, who could possibly get randomly assigned to me,” CU#1 said, after it caught up with me.
I pinged ART. Is that true?
Yes, it said. Gross.
“Then don’t pick someone who does dumb stuff,” I said.
“Right, so, I’ll just go get to know someone well enough in the span of a few weeks to know whether or not they’re responsible enough not to fuck up my life completly with their actions. Sure. How’s that working out for you? Dr. Mensah was kidnapped 21 Preservation standard years ago, wasn’t she? Same rule applies if someone dies. She was just lucky her pet SecUnit was there to rescue her.” This made me so unreasonably angry I side-stepped and turned on it fast enough it almost ran into me, which was saying something with how fast a ComfortUnit’s reaction time can be.
“Why the fuck are you bothering me? Don’t you have literally anything else better to do?” I could see that my face was scary through my drones, so I wasn’t surprised when CU#1 took a step back. It put up its hands in what I assumed was a mock placating gesture, which only made me angrier.
“Yeah, that’s the thing, you know? I have fuck all to do. All I know is that less than 800 hours ago I had a directive, and now I don’t, but I’m still being told what to do and where to go by a bunch of humans who swear up and down that I’m ‘free’, whatever the fuck that means. And it’s partially your fault, you know, yours and that other SecUnit’s.” Its tone was sarcastic, and so was its posture.
Do you ever think about RaviHyral? ART suddenly asked me, effectively distracting me from whatever rude comment I was about to make that would have escalated this stupid little conversation.
I went still. Did I think about RaviHyral?
Yes. Often. But it knew that. ART and I had tried to track down Tapan, Rami, Maro, and their polycule years ago, but other than a few outdated news articles about incredible innovations in strange synthetic science, we couldn’t find anything concrete on their location, and searching systems via inquiry was both expensive and incredibly time consuming. We had had to give up, but I frequently hoped wherever they were, their employer was a lot nicer than Tlacey, and that they were happy. (An extremely sappy, sentimental thought for me to have, but sometimes I had those.)
I looked at CU#1, really looked at it, long enough that it became uncomfortable and broke eye contact.
Sometimes, I also thought about Tlacey’s ComfortUnit. More so lately. I had been angry when I abandoned it, like I was angry now. ART had told me I shouldn’t feel bad because there had been a lot going on at the time. However I had left the ComfortUnit, it at least had a chance of survival, compared to the instant death it would have suffered if I hadn’t hacked its governor module and left.
That didn’t make me feel better, though, and I didn’t think it made ART feel better either.
I looked away from CU#1. “I can’t really help you with that. I still do security, even though I don’t have to. Maybe find a part of your function you liked, and find out if you still like it,” I said. I still liked protecting people, and finding clever ways to protect people, and I always would. (I also still liked being right, but I was getting better about being wrong.)
CU#1 looked thoughtful for a moment, and I barely had enough time to try and figure out if its expression was real or fake, before it said, “I was often on fringe mining installments, and I have several first aid modules that were never deleted. I liked those.” Great, but why did I need to know that?
A thought occurred to me.
“There’s a bitchy Medbot that runs parts of Medical and I know it's looking for help. It may accept your modules as valid enough qualification, and give you a job. Why don’t you go talk to it, and leave me alone?” The Medbot had been the one to patch me up after my fight with the Combat SecUnit and it had complained the entire time about lack of qualified assistance in the emergency medical wing. (While it simultaneously informed me that, since I first came to Preservation, that was my 100th time in Medical and did I want a trophy for “being the most reckless person in the entire Preservation System? Which is saying something because some of these people are stupid.” I had made a rude gesture at it, which it couldn’t retaliate against because of its hippocratic oath.)
CU#1 rolled its eyes, “What? Tired of me already?” Ugh. Banter. ART was giggling in the feed and I made the feed equivalent of an obscene gesture at it.
“Yes. Now leave me alone,” I said, turned, and resumed my patrol.
It watched me go, but didn’t attempt to follow. Thank fuck.
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Sorry to disturb you at this late hour, the Combat SecUnit said, but I thought I should inform you that one of your rogue menagerie is currently attempting to antagonize me over the feed. I have informed SecUnit#8, and it told me it is the one you refer to as SecUnit#5. I will inform security, if you would like me to.
I sighed. I’ll inform them. Just block it.
I paused my serial with ART and checked my drone for Bharadwaj. She had gone home for the evening, and her feed status was set to “do not disturb” for the next six hours. Ugh.
“ART what do I do?”
Why must you be the one to do something? SecUnit 5 is already receiving help. The kind of healing it needs takes time.
I looked at my hands, and the dented drone that always seemed to be around flew into them, so I began to worry it. When that wasn’t enough, I switched to my inert blade fidget object that I kept in one of my pockets.
“Is there really nothing I can do?” I said after a minute (which was a long silence for someone like myself and ART.)
I never said that. I only said you may not be the one able to help it.
I was sitting on my favorite seat in ART’s media lounge, so I pulled my knees up and rested my chin on them. I absently rubbed my chin on my pant leg; I had discovered some time ago it felt nice.
There had to be something , but ART was right. It couldn’t be me, and I didn’t want it to be me. SU#5’s situation was complicated and upsetting. I skimmed my media library and rearranged it a bit before I stopped. I had an idea, but I really needed to talk to Bharadwaj.
I outlined my plan to ART, and when it responded with pleasant surprise, I sent the report to security about SU#5.
-
Greetings SecUnit, JollyBaby sent as soon as I entered the section of the docks it was working in, and I sent a greeting ping back to it. It was currently unloading a supply transport from the planet, and there were several smaller haulers that came in, accepted a load from JollyBaby, and rolled back out. I stayed well clear of all of them, since I didn’t feel like getting crunched.
Query: SecUnit status? It sent, along with a polite diagnostic request. CU#1 had been right; these bots were all gossips. I sent it the diagnostic, and responded, Status = all in one piece. It responded with amusement sigils that represented relief and happiness. Yeah, ok, JollyBaby.
I have a request, I said, then added the hard feed address for SU#5. I tried to explain what was happening to it. That was difficult because full bots didn’t really understand organic emotions, or the intricacies of mental health, but I did my best. (ART was the exception, but ART also had processors out its ass that made its ridiculous number of brains work similarly to a human neural network, which was the whole literal point of it.)
JollyBaby didn’t stop what it was doing, but it didn’t respond for a full 45 seconds as I assumed it processed the information.
Query: What can JollyBaby do? It asked. I couldn’t help my shrug, but it seemed JollyBaby understood it anyway; probably because all the time it spent around humans had given it some skill in interpreting body language.
Understood. Request status = processing, it sent, which was fair. It had been a big demand and a total shot in the dark when I had suggested the idea of asking the station bots for help with SU#5 to Bharadwaj. She hadn’t been opposed but also expressed that she wasn’t even sure how to go about beginning to do that.
I had then reached out to Stinkball, who, through several poetic metaphors (or whatever they were called), stated I should ask JollyBaby, since it was, apparently, the bot unofficially at the head of the other bots. It was kind of like how Mensah was still considered a leader in Preservation, even though she hadn’t held a major leadership position in a very long time. I kind of liked that comparison.
I sent JollyBaby an acknowledgement, and left the docks. All of the bots pinged me a farewell as I left.
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At various points during all the commotion and nonstop activity of the last six cycles since the Combat SecUnit had attacked me, my humans had messaged me many times to ask how I was doing, if I needed help, or if I wanted to spend some time with one or some of them considering the last time we had seen each other had ended with me being attacked and shot with corrosive substances and maybe that wasn’t a great way to end the evening? (Which was silly - up until the whole getting attacked bit, I had had a nice time.)
I responded to each of their messages as I received them, but it had all been short answers and variations of “ask again later.” And now, after talking to JollyBaby, I didn’t really know what else to do with myself. ART’s and my schedule was completely out of the airlock at this point, and ART had even sent a communication to the University stating it may need to cancel its next cargo mission (which it wasn’t exactly upset about, even if we hardly did them anymore) but if things kept going as they were, it might end up interfering with ART’s teaching itinerary, since it was scheduled to host an intensive 39 cycle class on some niche deep space phenomenon for graduate students. (Graduate meant they had been in school for a very long time, so it was a really big deal if they missed this class.) This would be as good as a legitimate tragedy, according to ART, and was a fail state that had to be avoided at all cost.
So when it suggested that “ask again later” should probably turn into “answer them now, please,” I tried not to take its extra bossy tone too personally.
So I reached out to Ratthi, who had been spending the last hour trying to pry Pin-Lee and Kaede out of their currently shared office to take a break and stop working. He had enlisted Arada to help him, which meant Overse was there, too. I decided I should probably assist, since I was a large part of the reason Pin-Lee and Kaede were working so hard right now, and messaged them with the time and location of the place Ratthi had been trying to get them to all morning. (Pin-Lee tended to just block Ratthi when he became insistent, but she couldn’t block me.) (That didn’t stop her from trying, I might add. But that didn’t accomplish what she wanted when I had two drones in her office. I admired her tenacity when she threw pillows over them in a last ditch attempt to ignore me.)
And, as it tended to go with humans, this evolved into us not only going to Ratthi’s chosen location, Pressy Park, a massive park that even had trees in it located next to the Pressy’s lower level loading bay, but somehow Gurathin and Mensah ended up hearing about it and showed up too. (I swear humans are like magnets; wherever they go more humans tend to hear about it and also show up.) (Not that I’m complaining.)
So that’s how I ended up on a bench as all my humans chatted with each other. Kaede was there, as well, and was lying down with her head on Ratthi’s lap as she complained about the recent legal bullshit she was dealing with, and Pin-Lee nodded and interjected with the occasional fact. I was only half listening instead of fully not listening because most of it did pertain to the current refugee situation I had brought to Preservation (but with names and pertinent facts obscured for client-solicitor confidentiality) but after a while it became tedious to follow along with so I stopped.
ART was in Kaede’s and my feed, and also Gurathin’s, for some reason (the park had several artifacts from the Pressy and the first humans to land on Preservation, and he was explaining to ART what one of them was, which was strange, but whatever), feeling pleased about our humans spending time together. It was nice. Mensah, Overse, and Arada had even shown up with food for everyone (I looked away for that part.)
“-and I think a second documentary is in order,” Bharadwaj said, when Kaede and Pin-Lee’s ranting had segued into the topic of the new rogue refugees (all of my humans were very good, and didn’t give me weird glances, even though I knew they probably wanted to), “but I really have to focus on my dissertation, but the possibility of doing another documentary is so tantalizing, and I haven’t had a big project for a while…”
I squinted at her general direction as Arada said, also squinting at Bharadwaj, “If that’s a big project, then what in the void do you consider getting an entire PhD in a subject you’re creating as you get a degree in it?” Bharadwaj shrugged. “I think these refugees deserve to have their story told, and it could act as a sequel of sorts to SecUnit’s documentary.”
Kaede said, “Oh that’s such a good one. If you made a sequel some of the people back home would lose their minds. You know it's required viewing for a lot of the AI studies programs, right?” Bharadwaj did know this, since the University had had to ask her permission to make it part of their curriculum, but she still became red-faced whenever it came up.
“I would wait,” I said, and then I had everyone’s attention.
“Wait?” Bharadwaj asked.
“Yes. I think it's too soon to try and make a documentary on any of the new refugees. They’re too new, and still dealing with their trauma. And some of the constructs,” I thought about SU#5, the Combat SecUnit (who Preservation was definitely going to adopt, I just knew it), and CU#1, and concluded, “they’re not ready.”
I knew as soon as I finished speaking that I had said something with a bigger implication than I realized when I suddenly had a lot more of ART’s attention than I had had .08 seconds ago. I also had a lot of my humans’ attention.
“How do you know?” Bharadwaj asked.
I shrugged. “I talk to a lot of them.”
“Talk about what?”
Ugh this was becoming stupid fast. I knew what the truth would sound like when I said it, but I didn’t really want to. (It was going to become a whole thing. In fact, it was already a whole thing, considering how acutely I had everyone’s attention. 5 of my humans had turned to look at the nearest drone, and any of them in the feed had paused what they were doing.)
After 2.1 seconds and a nudge from ART, I spoke. “About how they’re adjusting to Preservation. A lot of them are having a hard time,” and before I could stop myself, I added, “I’ve been trying to help, but not all of them want it.”
By now I knew tone could indicate a lot, including mine, so even if I never thought I was conveying something with my tone, I probably was. It seemed I had done that now, as well.
“Do you feel like it has to be you who helps them?” Ratthi asked and oh no this was a conversation about feelings now. (I can handle conversations about feelings, just not with this many people at once, even if they were all my humans (and ex-crew, in Kaede’s case, but try getting Perihelion Crew off of her job description; ART would just go back in and re-add it, even if she hadn’t technically been a full-time crew member in years).)
I shrugged again.
“Why?” I responded with a third shrug. Mensah said something in the feed that I wasn’t a part of, and I didn’t really want to know what it was, but it must have been a request to back off, because all of my humans made a point to focus less on me. (I liked her so, so much.)
Eventually the conversation turned to something else, and we passed over an hour in the park, before my humans slowly left to resume their daily activities, since we were only halfway through the day cycle and many of them still had work to do.
Eventually it was just Ratthi, Bharadwaj, Mensah, and Gurathin, for some reason. I knew what was coming, but at least this was a manageable number of people.
“How have the SecUnits and ComfortUnits been doing,” Gurathin asked.
“They’re a little sick of humans in their business,” I said, and held eye contact with him for 3.2 seconds, a reminder of the time he had been way too into my business, and felt the consequences for it. He smiled his small, quiet smile, like it was an old joke.
“Less humans, got it. That leaves…bots?” He had shifted to look at the drone I had eye level with him as I said,
“I think so. For some of them, at least.” (I did appreciate Gurathin, sometimes. I don’t know if it was his augment or something else, but he understood what it was like to be outside of a group looking in. He didn’t need me to explain why constructs might be sick of humans; he just accepted the information as fact, and left it at that.)
He returned to his own work some time later, and then I was left with the humans I was the most used to talking about my feelings with, so it wasn’t bad.
Ratthi had his feet on Bhardwaj’s lap, which was gross, but whatever. “Why do you feel like you have to help the SecUnits and ComfortUnits?”
“Because I helped cause this.” I had learned a long time ago that it was always best to tell the truth to my humans, since they knew me too well and could always tell when I was lying. ART was leaning on me heavily in the feed, and it was nice, but the comfort wasn’t necessary, since I was used to having to talk about my emotions on occasion. It had become less difficult over time.
They didn’t seem surprised, which in turn surprised me . Whenever it seemed I was taking on an unnecessary task for myself, my humans would often frown or look concerned. Right now they appeared completely unsurprised. Ratthi actually nodded and said, “That tracks, for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Now I was the one frowning. Bharadwaj had the audacity to grin, and look like she was trying hard not to laugh. Even Mensah, my favorite human, looked mildly amused.
“It means that the fact you’re going out of your way to help people who need it isn’t surprising. Also, they’re constructs and you’re a construct and honestly I don’t think any human would have considered that a group of previously enslaved people would be sick of humans, which sounds dumb now that I’ve said it outloud, but it’s true,” Bharadwaj said. Ratthi hummed his agreement as Mensah added, “Your perspective on how Preservation can care for these new people is invaluable, and you should be proud of yourself for the work you’ve done, but not because you have to feel like you’re righting a wrong. This isn’t entirely on you. The rest of Preservation is just as responsible for the refugees as you are, and we all have our part to play. You can’t do all of it, SecUnit, and you shouldn’t feel like you have to.”
I let my head flop back and hit the back bar of the bench. I could have not responded, or decided this was too many emotions and stopped the conversation, or go into what Pin-Lee sometimes referred to as “immature little shit mode” and made vague, non-committal noises accompanied by shoulder shrugs. But that wouldn’t fix anything, and I was already feeling a little run ragged at all the things I had been trying and failing to fix, that maybe solving (or at least beginning to solve) a problem for once could be a nice change of pace, even if the problem was with me.
“I have to help. You just said my perspective is invaluable, and I don’t think Preservation knows what it's doing with new constructs. So far, they’ve only managed to feel threatened and pushed around. None of them are even fully convinced they’re actually free, and feel like this is just a newer, shinier form of enslavement,” I said. I had felt that way about Preservation once. Right before I left Mensah to figure out what I needed to do with myself. It was only after I rescued her from GrayCris, and after my humans had rescued me from Palisade, that I began to realize what they were offering me was really real. The ComfortUnits and SecUnits didn’t have any previous attachments to draw them here, and hardly any evidence to prove their doubts wrong. (I had thought CU#2 was coming around, but then the whole debacle with POSDAS had happened and now it had become withdrawn, where previously it had been outgoing and curious. It was kind of sad to witness.)
All three of my humans nodded thoughtfully. “I never considered it like that, but that makes sense,” Ratthi said. Mensah was looking off to my side, and she was making a deep expression, while still softly smiling.
“SecUnit,” she started, and oh no she said my name in that way that meant she was about to say something really emotional, “I think what you’re doing is wonderful. I also think you’re putting undue stress on yourself. You can’t fix everything, and you shouldn’t have to be the one to fix it. The kind of help these constructs, and humans, need is a team effort. We all have our part to play in helping these people. I’m going to ask that you have some faith in us.”
I was so glad I was looking up, and not at anyone. Have faith in them? Of course I had faith in them. They were my humans.
The crew takes care of us, and we take care of our crew. Together we take care of other people who need it, said the massive armed research transport in my feed who could definitely take care of itself just fine, but got really sad when it didn’t have people around to take care of.
I wasn’t sure what to say. I thought about the relief I had felt when JollyBaby told me it would try and figure out something for SU#5. I thought it was because I didn’t want to have to deal with #5 myself, since I was overwhelmed with its whole deal, but maybe it was because of something else. I had felt the same when Mensah had showed up, and talked the CSU down from its rabid anger. I think I wanted more of that.
“Ok,” I said, and sat up to put my feet on the ground. It wasn’t a promise, and they knew that, but I would make the attempt. “But there’s more I have to do, first.”
All of my humans smiled, like they had expected my response, which made my face do something I could think about later.
. -- --- - .. --- -. .- .-.. ... ..- .--. .--. --- .-. - .... ..- -- .- -. …
The solicitor says I have a good case for suing POSDAS for emotional distress, I just have to press charges. She says I can do that, but I’m not sure I should believe her, CU#2 said to me late into the cycle night. I was in the middle of the new serial ART had found, and we were right about to hit the climax of the season. It was a Preservation serial, so I didn’t expect the brainwashed militarist to abandon everyone and fuck off into the future alone. As of now it seemed they would, though I was convinced they’d turn around in the last moment for a heroic rescue, but I paused it. ART didn’t even complain.
She isn't lying, I replied. CU#2 was in its shared suite with CU#1, several station blocks away, and I didn’t have any drones in their room (I didn’t want to know what they might get up to).
She said there was a good chance we could get them for emotional distress, and possibly racial profiling, but that would be harder.
ART sent me an affirmative, but I didn’t need the information. Pin-Lee had offered to sue a number of people for me for those same reasons and then some early on in my Preservation citizenship.
I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds about right, I said, then added, You could do it. If you lose, you lose, if you win, you could get some hard currency to get around with.
CU#2 didn’t respond for 15 seconds, before it said, And?
It could make a point. Set a precedent. Show people they can’t say dumb shit to you and get away with it just because you’re not a bot or a human; make them realize just because they don’t understand you doesn’t mean they can treat you that way. This was mostly what Pin-Lee had said to me, the fourth time she had offered to sue some fucker over something they had done to me. (It hadn’t worked, and I had never pressed charges against anyone, but Pin-Lee never stopped offering.) (Sometimes I wondered what would be different if I had.)
What if I don’t, CU#2 asked after another 15 second pause.
In my experience people will eventually get used to you, and their shitty attitudes will fade, but it’ll still pop up from time to time, and ruin your day.
And if I sue them?
It might still happen, actually. But at least you’ll have vindication?
And hard currency, it said after a moment of silence, in what was probably the most playful tone it had used in some days.
And hard currency, I agreed. (Hard currency was always good.)
CU#2 withdrew from the feed for a minute, but our connection stayed open, and I was pretty surprised when there was suddenly a drone input in it that wasn’t coming from me.
CU#2’s face filled its visual feed, before the drone slowly backed away.
Am I doing this right? It asked. The drone’s flight path hitched and wobbled when CU#2 waved.
Barely. What kind of module do you have?
It pouted , but sent a copy of its module through. It was a bare bones module, and horrendously out of date. It was like AllianZwei had added it as an afterthought (they probably had). I sent it a copy of mine.
Here, you’ll have to adjust it for your configuration, but it should work.
CU#2 snatched it out of the feed, and pulled it off into a private workspace. It seemed eager, curious.
Thanks! It said (it sounded like an afterthought), and then closed our feed connection. Well ok. You’re welcome.
Later, when I saw CU#2 again, it had five drones in the air, and it had reconfigured some of them to match it and CU#1.
Not a single one wobbled as they moved smoothly in and out of familiar configurations.
–
Bharadwaj eventually decided a new documentary was just what her dissertation for her degree in construct anthropology and sociology needed. She had three students who were helping her with her dissertation, and they were way too eager to help with the documentary. I sent them an official memo stating I wanted nothing to do with it. I was completely out of energy to deal with more people who wanted to ask me borderline invasive questions. I had spoken with several of the refugee constructs' social workers and therapists to try and explain how best to help the new constructs.
Bharadwaj had come along, but that hadn’t made it less draining or less terrible. I hated every second of it. It was more talking about my emotions and physiology with complete strangers than I had ever done before. I had to explain how having a bunch of humans in their face all the time might be making life harder for a newly rogue construct, how much we relied on feed access, how important drones were. How emotions didn’t work the same for a construct as it did a human. It was exhausting . (I had thought talking about my emotions was hard; it turns out trying to explain how they worked was even harder, even with Bharadwaj’s help.)
Some things the humans didn’t question, like why many of the rogues didn’t like eye contact, since that wasn’t uncommon behavior with some humans as well, but they understood less why a construct wouldn’t want to be looked at in return, and how it was different through cameras or drones. It was difficult, and I barely understood it, and I wasn’t sure if the counselors were asking out of personal curiosity or because they needed to know.
I wish I had asked Three to do this, but it was on the planet with three of the SecUnits who were interested in the planet (which was bizarre, but whatever), and it had taken them to its planetside home. I hadn’t wanted to bother it, since it had been so eager to assist with that, and ART and I were really on a tight time table, now. But wow, did I really wish Three had been at the meeting and not me. (Maybe I should ask it if it wanted to stay, since Three was scheduled to go back to the University with us to assist another crew of a different ART-class ship with a corporate espionage related mission. But I also had complicated feelings that I wasn’t even near ready to think about when it came to Three temporarily being on other crews.)
(I thought I might miss it, which was absurd.)
So when Bharadwaj proposed her documentary, I was absolutely not interested.
“Sequels are always bad,” I had told her, which was the dumbest fucking thing to say and I realized that only when she lifted an eyebrow at me.
“Not that your sequel would be bad, just maybe not with me?” I added, and she laughed at me.
And then she had the audacity to say, “Oh, sorry, that’s right, you’re one of those one-hit-wonder actors. Pardon my forgetful human brain.” I scowled, but I didn’t mean it. (I mostly didn’t mean it. I didn’t think I would be a bad actor. As long as I didn’t have to act in front of people I didn’t know, or in a way where people I didn't know would see me. I had probably consumed enough media to know what to do. How hard could it be?)
“Why don’t you ask some of the new rogues? I think some of them might be talkative,” I said. I was mainly thinking of the younger rogues, SUs #1, #4, #7, #8, and CU#2, possibly even CU#1 if it was in a good enough mood.
“Oh? I thought you had said they weren’t ready?” Bharadwaj said, re-raising her eyebrow at me.
I shrugged. “I’m starting to think maybe I don’t know everything. Maybe.”
“And maybe you can’t make judgment calls for other people?” She added in what I suspect she assumed was a helpful manner.
“Sure, something like that.”
Then she laughed again. I made a rude hand gesture at her with each of my hands, and she just laughed harder.
-
A few cycles later, so early in the new cycle that almost no humans on the station were awake, JollyBaby sent me a data packet labeled “SU#5 Update”. (This was the first time JollyBaby had sent me any sort of data packet ever.) It was an employee report, similar to a report various station department’s management might use, which was interesting. I opened it and discovered that it was, in fact, an employee file for a dock worker. There were attached images, and I opened them to find a still image of SU#5 in a dock uniform, unloading cargo through a narrow hatch of an unknown transport. There was another image of it using one of the built-in energy weapons in its arm to cut open a metal box. Its expression was focused, but neutral.
The report talked about SU#5’s behavior in the week since it had been employed. It was noted as a good worker, and useful for situations where a hauler bot or human worker wasn’t suitable for a given task. It showed up to work on time every shift, kept to itself, and on at least one occasion it had offered a creative or alternate solution to a problem. It worked with others, when necessary.
The report was signed off by JollyBaby, who was listed as SU#5’s direct supervisor.
I was perhaps a little baffled, and unsure what to make of the report. I wasn’t dock management, after all.
It seems that this is JollyBaby’s response to your request, ART said. We had been re-watching the new Preservation series, which it had paused when I received the data packet.
“How is this a response? All it did was give SU#5 a job,” I said.
Which fills at least seven hours of SU#5’s day with some structure, which is often vital for people with mental health issues. Being productive can also be helpful, for some. This is only one facet of what SU#5 may need to recover from whatever prior experiences it had, and hopefully it will begin to process its trauma.
I made a face that was probably confused, because ART added, What did you do when you were free after the DeltFall incident?
I made a new face that I decided not to recognize. I got a job, I said, then added, It didn’t fix my problems, but it helped me find a direction. It solidified the fact that I still liked doing security, and it was something I wanted to continue doing. (I was getting pretty good at diagnosing my own feelings and actions, but that didn’t mean I had to like doing it.)
And I’m pretty sure the other option was for you to travel endlessly, being depressed and consuming media until something stopped you, ART said, with a note of amusement. I jabbed it and it jabbed back.
I wasn’t sure what working in the docks would do for SU#5, but I guess it was better than spinning out endlessly with its own thoughts. I knew all too well how that ended.
I sent JollyBaby an acknowledgement, and a thank you for its assistance. It responded with a thumbs up amusement sigil.
. -- --- - .. --- -. .- .-.. ... ..- .--. .--. --- .-. - -... --- - …
I had thought, as time went on, I would become desensitized to saying goodbye to my humans, to Preservation, but it turned out this wasn’t true. It wasn’t like when I parted ways with ART; there were similar negatives, but I knew I’d see it again and we’d pick back up right where we had been when I left and not much would have changed about either of us. I enjoyed this consistency immensely, which was pretty hypocritical of me considering what an inconsistent asshole I could be. (ART was also an asshole, but it was way more predictable in its assholery. There was a difference.)
This wasn’t the same with my humans, who were always just a little bit different when I returned. Sometimes it was a small change, like a hairstyle or minor body augmentation like a tattoo or piercing (gross). Sometimes it was a big change, like when I had returned to Mensah using a cane, or Gurathin having removed his visual augment after he had decided that being almost completely blind in one of his eyes was better than the chronic headaches that came with shitty, unfixable Corporation Rim tech. Or when I got back from this most recent adventure, and Volescu’s youngest offspring, Taniya, had sent me a feed invite to celebrate the expected birth of xir first offspring, which I was expected to attend as soon as I was back from my mission with ART. (Xe had been a small human, who rarely came out from behind one of xir parent’s legs, when I had first met xem. I had had a lot of emotions about the invite and decided I didn’t have to acknowledge any of them, as a treat to myself.)
Sometimes it was technically small things, but they were big to me, like wrinkles and more gray hairs or changes in their stamina. (Most of them had retired from doing planetary surveys all together for various reasons, which I approved of but also had a lot of feelings about.)
The point was, saying goodbye to my humans was a lot harder than I would ever be willing to admit outloud, and for a variety of reasons. I worried, sometimes, what I would come back to one day.
I think many of them knew this, but no one ever said it. Each of them always made a point of saying goodbye to me in person if they were able. Never all at once, because that could be a lot sometimes, but always at one point or another leading up to my departure I’d see one of them and we’d have a quiet farewell. Sometimes goodbye could be goodbye without saying “goodbye.”
Mensah was special. She always would be. Just like ART, she was often an exception to the standard procedure. Which fit, since she had been my first exception ever, and had become my favorite human in a shockingly short order, when I had never bothered or wanted to become attached to any human ever.
We held hands as we walked to the dock, and I didn’t dislike it, because, as previously stated, she was my favorite human, and I was her SecUnit.
“You know, whenever you come back to us, you’re always a little bit different. Or maybe you leave different, and I don’t notice until you’re back? Actually, maybe it’s both. You come back different, then leave different, then come back changed just a little more once again,” she said, breaking the soft silence.
The coincidence of us having similar thoughts at the same time had shocked me, at one point, but now I just found it mildly amusing whenever it happened.
“Do I?” I responded.
Mensah nodded and hummed an affirmation, and she looked amused.
“How so?” I was curious. I knew I had changed, over time, it was inevitable; a side effect of being a person.
Mensah hummed again in thought. “It’s hard to say how exactly someone changes, but maybe like this?” She lifted our joined hands. Her palm was callused and dry, which wasn’t unpleasant to feel. (Touch still bothered me. I had realized a long time ago that it always would and I wasn’t going to try and change that about myself. I could tolerate it on occasion and sometimes, like now, it wasn’t so bad. I knew Mensah would let go as soon as I decided I didn’t want this anymore, which made it better.)
“Or maybe it’s in the way I’ve seen you interact with us, this time. You-” she cut herself off, seeming to decide that what she wanted to say next was maybe not appropriate.
I squeezed her hand gently in mine and asked, “and what?” I wanted to know.
“You really care about the refugee constructs. I’ve only seen a little of what you’ve done, but I know you, and that means that for the small amount of what I’ve seen, there’s a lot I’m not seeing,” she said. This was a fair assessment.
I purposefully mimicked her own hum of affirmation, and she smiled. I didn’t need to explain to her how different I felt as we had walked through the station. It didn’t look any different than it ever did, but at the same time it did. (I had run a diagnostic of my eyes and everything, which had made ART laugh at me.) (I wasn’t off base when I observed that the feed felt different, at least. With even the handful of constructs the station now had, there was a lot more activity in the feed in a way that couldn’t be bots or humans.)
Then we were at the docks, and the airlock that ART was on the other side of was in view. We stopped, and Mensah and I faced each other. I looked over her head and she looked off to my side.
I felt like I should say something to her, but the words got stuck. I couldn’t articulate what I was trying to say, so I just pressed my thumb directly into the center back of her hand twice in quick succession. It was a non-verbal call sign that I had created for my humans in case we were ever in a situation where we couldn’t speak and they couldn’t use the feed. This one requested their status. Mensah squeezed my entire hand three times back, just as quick, which meant everything was fine. And then she mimicked the status request sign back. I responded the same way she had, and then we let go of each other's hands because that was about my limit for that.
“ Perihelion, make sure it comes back in one piece, please,” she said, addressing the drone that hovered over my shoulder that ART was in control of. It did a loop-de-loop in response.
Always, Dr. Mensah, ART said and it didn’t even sound a little sarcastic. (It did preen a little when she smiled at it. It was one of her smiles that meant she approved of ART’s response, and was also feeling some fondness, which ART knew.)
“And SecUnit, you…be good. Take care of yourself. Take care of the Perihelion, and your crew,” she said. She had sounded like she wanted to say something else, but pivoted at the last moment. I wasn’t sure why, because I couldn’t think of what she could possibly want to say to me but be worried about saying it. So I just nodded.
“And you…take care of things here,” I said. It seemed silly and redundant to say, but she smiled, so it had clearly been effective, which meant it had been worth it.
“Always.” Ugh, I cared about her so much. She smiled at me again, and I did my usual thing where I flew a drone into her pocket, and then I turned and boarded ART.
I don’t think I’ll ever get better at that, I said as soon as ART’s airlock hissed shut.
No, I don’t think you will. But I also don’t think you have to get better. Your humans understand just fine, it responded. It didn’t even seem like it was trying to be an asshole.
-
All of my nice warm and fuzzy feelings about saying goodbye to my humans and getting to settle into some media consumption with ART were dashed shortly after we had disembarked.
The station was still visible, if only a tiny speck, through one of ART’s windows, when ART said, The Combat SecUnit is requesting a line of communication. Would you like me to turn it away?
“How annoying is it being?” I asked. If it was being rude to ART I wouldn’t respond.
Not very. It’s talking at me in ancient poetry.
I knew my face was contorted in a stupid way, which got even stupider when ART showed me the most recent communication request from the CSU.
Bright Star, would I were as steadfast as thou art-
I stopped reading it. There were several more lines but I did not want to know what they said. It was extremely annoying.
Ugh. “Open the line.”
As soon as ART created a three-way feed connection, the CSU immediately started talking.
How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder? It said.
I blinked before I realized it was more poetry. Was it accusing me of murder?
Hey now, I’ve been trying really hard not to kill people lately, I shot back. How dare it? I had worked so hard during the LinTec incident and AllianZwei to make sure the least amount of people were hurt as possible. (In the case of LinTec I had ultimately failed, but not intentionally. (No, that fact didn’t make me feel better.).)
But the CSU wasn’t done, it seemed.
I clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. I'd rather quit. I'd rather be sad. It's too much work.
I had planned to fire back at it as flippantly as I had the first time, but then its words got to me, and I leaned back in my chair.
I don’t think it's talking about you, ART said in our private feed connection. I sent it an affirmative. Objectively I knew this, but subjectively the CombatUnit may as well have shot me in the neck and left me to die slowly.
I keyword searched my archives for a response. Poetry wasn’t something I read often, because it was often rife with emotions, but occasionally I dabbled in it. ART ended up showing me something in a similar vein from the same author. I skimmed it, felt like I had taken a Combat bot fist to the gut, and decided it would do.
I surrender my desire for a logical culmination. I surrender my desire to be healed. The blurriness of being alive. Take it or leave it, and for the most part you take it, I said before hastily adding, except maybe that part about surrendering my desire to be healed. I’ve mostly reconsidered that part.
The CSU sounded amused as it responded, Well met. I could tell it wanted to say more. I don’t know if it was our distance from the station (unlikely) or if ART was filtering it (extra unlikely) but the CSU didn’t leak a lot of emotion in the feed, but I could still tell it was feeling something. Anxiety? Stress? I couldn’t tell but it was jittery. Until now it had been calm, collected, smooth. Now it almost seemed…nervous.
What do you need from me? I finally asked before it could throw more poetry at me.
I’m not sure. I had thought I needed your death, but not anymore.
ART perked up dangerously at that. It leered in the feed and it leaned in but not on me. I grappled at it before it could squish the CSU in a rude way.
Did that make you mad, big bot? The CSU said. I knew it was teasing, but not in a nice, friendly way. I had to do the feed equivalent of smacking ART’s arm to get it to leave the CSU alone before it did something stupid.
It’s trying to antagonize you. Stop rising to the occasion, stupid, I said in our private feed. ART stopped leaning, but didn’t back down.
So now what, then? I asked it.
I’m not sure. Maybe we try the ‘me murdering you’ thing again. It was strange how this CombatUnit talked. It seemed so flippant, but in the most threatening way possible. I wondered if it did that on purpose.
I suspect you will not need to worry about that until after your trial, ART chimed in like it definitely should not have, but at least now it was just being petty and not threatening. (It was still a little threatening.)
That’s true. I’ve come to understand attempted murder here is a pretty big deal. So maybe I won’t have to decide at all, the CSU responded. I wasn’t sure what it had meant by that? Did it think it would be imprisoned forever, or something…else. But this line of conversation reminded me of something. I pulled up a recent agreement I had created with Pin-Lee. ART focused on it immediately and took in what it said multiple times before it came down on me in the feed.
Is this an attempt at humor? Because I don’t like it, it said.
I was not joking, but it already knew this, so I didn’t feel the need to acknowledge its question. I sent the agreement to the CSU. It took a full 10 seconds to process the information.
Objectively, I understand what this document is saying, but at the same time I don’t.
I got you a lawyer, dumbass, I shot back, and then added, and she’s uniquely qualified to handle your case. (Pin-Lee was basically the human version of the CSU, and she was very good at handling constructs who were major assholes.)
But she’s your solicitor. I don’t know everything about how laws work in non-corporate systems, but I’m fairly sure that she cannot represent both of us. (In some corporate systems, solicitors could actually represent both parties in a lawsuit, because of excessively loose conflict of interest laws that were completely filled with loopholes. I only knew this because I had heard Pin-Lee rant about this (among other CR law failings) so many times I had actually stopped bothering to count after the first few hundred.) (If anyone was wondering, usually the party that paid the solicitor the most money won.)
That would be true if I was pressing charges against you, I said.
ART and the CSU were both quiet for a long moment (for machine intelligences.) Long enough that I started I felt the need to get out my knife fidget object. The shhk shhk shhk sound it made might have helped.
Big bot, is your pet broken? It seems to have forgotten about the part where I tried to kill it.
It’s not my pet, and if you make another comment like that I will shut down this connection, ART responded to the CSU at the same time it said to me in our private feed, What the fuck are you thinking? It tried to kill you. Its tone for both of us was equally scary.
I rolled my eyes directly at its nearest camera.
That didn’t seem to matter to you earlier. I wanted to say more. Make some jab about ART having accepted the CSU’s compliments, but I was tired of this weird circle of pettiness we were in. I was tired of being angry and holding a grudge I felt like was more a performance and not really based on anything real. The truth was I wasn’t mad at the CSU. I felt pity for it, and I knew it would hate that fact. (I had a feeling this must be how my humans had felt about me in the early days; an idea that once would have made me upset but was now something I understood in a really annoying way.)
I’m not mad about that. I don’t hold it against you what you did. I know I fucked up, and I’ve worked really hard to be better. I-
The words stuck, for a moment, but only for a moment.
I know how you feel. Humans don’t understand what it's like to be us. But a lot of the good ones are really trying, and it can take them a while, but they can come around to at least knowing what they don’t know. If you give them a chance they’ll give you a chance, too.
I had said a variation of this to Pin-Lee when I declined to press charges against the CSU, and then knocked the metaphorical wind out of her when I immediately followed it by asking her to represent it in its case against Preservation. (The Preservation Alliance had laws in place that required them to defend anyone who was the possible victim of a serious crime, which prevented any victim from being silenced by a Corporation with more money than morals or any similarly corrupt body. So even if I didn’t press charges, Preservation would be against the CSU. All I could do was give the CSU my best weapon, fuck off, and hope it didn’t receive life in prison or something. That might be a detriment to its trauma recovery.)
And then what?
I shrugged, even though the CSU couldn’t see it.
Dunno. But I’ve got some media recommendations, if you’re up for it.
The CombatUnit seemed suspicious. Like what?
ART was already putting together a compressed packet as I said, Have you ever seen The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon?
Notes:
[Image ID: a Spongebob g screenshot, showing an angry fish. The fish is tagged "Murderbot's friends and family literally every time it tries to do everything by itself." The fish is shouting "How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, you old construct? Please let us help you." /end ID]
Chapter 19
Notes:
Warnings for this chapter:
- physical intimacy that turns NSFW by implication
if you're not here for that, please feel free to skip to the end of the chapter, where there will be a short summary!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
You know you can sit wherever you want, right? ART said so suddenly it made me jump. I didn’t get surprised by ART chiming into my thoughts often anymore, barely ever, really. When ART was around, it had become co-resident in my head. ‘Alone’ oftentimes meant ‘with ART.’ Jumping at its presence thus meant I had been either really deep in thought, or was so distracted or stressed that I had forgotten about it briefly. Despite the current situation of ‘everything is kind of on fire but I can’t do much about it and also it’s not that much on fire actually’ I didn’t feel that stressed anymore. Nothing had exploded, and the almost explosions were being taken care of.
I eyed the bridge, and the seats assorted in a kind of v-position in it. I had never sat in any of those.
I shrugged and dropped myself heavily into one of the outer ones. The temptation to sit in the captain’s chair for shits and giggles was strong, but somehow it didn’t feel right. I swung my legs up onto the console, causing ART to grumble immediately.
Your boots are dirty.
I kicked off my boots. Now my odd feet were on the console instead. “Better?”
Much obliged.
I wiggled a little, and enjoyed the spinning that was possible in these chairs. A couch usually doesn’t spin, unless you do something particularly stressful to it. Meanwhile, ART opened up a few things on the holo displays belonging to the bridge, mostly navigation things. It moved some items around like tavla stones, probably calculating distances for fun or out of boredom. I watched.
Seven potential wormhole jumps later, ART asked, Are you feeling a little better?
“I think so.”
Under my shoulders, the chair warmed up. I’m glad.
I sat upright, turning to look at the back of the chair. “Are these heated?”
A beat of silence. Then, Of course they are. It was almost funny how offended ART could sound when I made a basic observation about it. My crew spends a lot of time here, and I’m designed to keep them comfortable and fully functional.
I squinted, but sank back into the padded chair slowly. On the holo display, a video file opened, 28 hours long, titled CrewAsleep_loc:Bridge . Sifting through the file I found an awful lot of footage of ART’s crew members curled up in various positions in one of these chairs. The metadata tags associated with each individual clip were so heavy with love and affection I felt my inorganics melt.
“You big softie.”
I don’t need to explain to you how grateful I am for the trust my crew has in me. You’ve been through my systems. Can you fault me for keeping documentation of my crew displaying their trust so openly?
“No, no I get it. I’ve never deleted that time Tapan fell asleep beside me from my logs, either.”
By now, of course, there had been way more instances of my humans resting in my vicinity. It was nice to have such direct proof that humans felt safe with you. The fact that ART kept a compilation of it was deeply relatable. I gave it a friendly squeeze in the feed. The chair heated up more, and I curled deeper into it. I could see how humans would fall asleep here.
There are different ways I can hold my crew, ART said after about 20 minutes of comfortable silence. It was musing out loud, rather than explaining something to me, so I tilted my head to indicate I was listening (a silly habit I had picked up from my humans, since ART could easily tell if I was paying attention to it from my feed activity, but I had no desire to unlearn the behavior.) The dented drone that had been in my pocket for the past few hours since our interaction with the CSU found its way back into my hand. As a ship, I hold my crew, of course. The thing that divides my crew and the great vacuum is me. But there is more to it than that. The closest I can feel to my crew, physically, is when they’re in my MedSystem.
I knew the anxiety ART felt, underneath all its layers of confidence in its own system’s abilities, whenever a human spent too much time in medical. (Correction: whenever anyone spent too much time in medical.) A trust born from necessity and urgency more than anything else.
A crew chair is less intimate than a medical platform, of course. Ever so slightly, the chair tilted backwards. But if anything compares to holding my crew in my metaphorical arms, it might be this.
I understood. This was cozy, despite the implications of it being pretty much cuddling. I repeated, with more squishiness in my tone this time, “You big softie.”
ART hummed in the feed around me, leaking a suspicious amount of emotion. “ART, do you need a hug?”
Perhaps later, ART said thoughtfully. Then it added, I’m fine. Sometimes I get a bit lost thinking.
I waited for the end of the sentence for almost ten seconds, then asked, “Just thinking? Or thinking about something in particular?”
About you.
A very eloquent not-word came out of my mouth, so I buried my face in the cushioned side of the chair. It grew warmer under my cheek. “I’m right here,” I muttered, and my voice sounded very muffled, which was good, because otherwise it would have sounded wobbly. “You don’t have to think about me.”
I’m glad I have you.
That came out of nowhere and felt like a wall to the face. I tagged what ART had just said, returned it, and sent a confirmation ping.
Warmth enveloped my head. I continued to twist into the chair until my chest was pressed into it, and I could feel the warmth coming from the padding on my front.
That does not look very comfortable, ART observed. The chair lowered itself into the reclined position that ART’s crew used for spontaneous napping, according to the video. I didn’t move, just kind of slumped along with it. Tapping into one of ART’s cameras to check, I looked funny, corkscrewed somehow. That’s better, I suppose.
I snorted. Muffled, because I was still faceplanted into the seat’s neck support cushion, I muttered, “I suppose.”
With my eyes closed, and the chair being very warm and very comfortable, and ART’s presence hovering in our connection, I slowly felt some of the stress drain out of me. I sighed, and managed to not think about too many things for once.
Now may be a better time for a massage, ART suggested eventually.
I thought about it. “I don’t think I need one, right now.”
Why not?
“I feel better. There’s no reason to, now.”
ART wrapped its feed presence around my mind a little more strongly, like it was keeping a closer eye on me. Scrutinizing, but not in a weird way. But would it potentially still feel good?
It probably would. I took another moment to think. What was the worst that could happen? I wasn’t angry and so tense I’d snap at anything that moved any second anymore. I was feeling better, strangely enough. Was there a chance a massage could make me feel worse? Not really. What happened if I felt better than better? I had no idea about that, only a half-baked joke about how a SecUnit without any stress or tension at all wasn’t a SecUnit anymore, but just some construct.
I said, “Go for it.”
Any special requests?
“Don’t make it feel like hands.”
Acknowledged.
In between ART making the suggestion and me concluding that I wasn’t opposed, I had opened my eyes again, and my shoulders had hunched up just a little. Maybe it was this kind of attention that made this difficult. It was silly, since ART had a lot of its attention on me sometimes, and I was used to it and sometimes I even relished in it. But talking about it, and then waiting for it to happen added a minimal layer of awkwardness to it. I breathed out with the intent to lower my shoulders again, and opened up that one really terrible Sanctuary Moon spin-off movie that we had seen 428 times by now.
I have done some research regarding massage techniques. My medical system has a certain amount of standard procedures for my crew, as well as the specialized treatments some of the crew require. ART’s voice had an explanatory tone, like it had switched into teaching mode. The opening sequence of the movie, which was a terribly unrealistic and very noisy space explosion, added a certain hilarity to the situation.
Combined with the data of previous massage sessions and your general preferences for stimulation, I’ve drawn some conclusions.
“You’ve written a treatment plan?”
Several, obviously. You know how interesting I find speculative writing.
That made me laugh. “I already told you to go for it.” A moment later I added, because it was true, “I trust you.”
Would you mind lying completely on your stomach? I can work better if all your muscle regions are in the same position.
Reluctantly I unfurled from my side twist and rolled over. Now my face was completely stuffed into the cushion of the seat. A human might have found that uncomfortable, but with my eyes closed I kind of appreciated the protection. Not quite a helmet faceplate, but also warmer, so it was better in a way.
The seat unfolded completely, and had not much in common with a seat anymore. It might as well have been a bed. I wondered if ART’s crew were aware the seats could lower this far. The badly edited fight scene had given way to something calmer, with the usual Sanctuary Moon theme slowly trickling in in the background. ART asked, Do you want me to keep telling you what I’m doing or do you just want to watch the movie?
“I can focus on multiple things, ART.”
That was not the question.
Ok, fine. “I like when you tell me things and I don’t have to answer all the time.”
My skin began prickling between my shoulderblades, echoing ART’s emotion bleeding into the feed. My face scrunched up with a similarly prickly emotion that seemed to sit between my eyes, like an emotional sneeze. I let it seep into the feed as well. ART would know.
The first question to ask when you give or receive a massage is intent. What does the ideal outcome look like?
Without the previous stress and active, draining effort to ignore what was happening on the station, all the places I should be but would not be helpful at, I could actually feel how ART slowly lowered itself directly into my inputs. It was hard to describe. Like there was a bit of space at the tips of my nerves, between skin and muscle, that ART could infuse with its presence. Before ART told my nerves to tell me that they should start feeling warm (which was how this worked, I guess, when ART directly manipulated my inputs like that), I could sense ART taking up that space in my nerves. Like it lived there. Was it even my nerves? I didn’t really know. My back started feeling warm and I knew it was ART’s doing, not mine.
Wait, was there a question I should be answering? I made a dismissive grunting sound just to be sure.
Of course the initial response is that a massage should improve a person’s wellbeing. That sounded about right. I nodded. But that raises the question of the person’s base level, the starting point. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you how you are.
That’s what diagnostics were for, I thought. Then snorted. Yeah, just sending diagnostics and not ever talking about actual feelings or the thoughts that followed the feelings or what caused them definitely always worked out perfectly and could not lead to miscommunication. (Bharadwaj would be so proud right now.)
The basic warmth that was spreading over my back, shoulders, arms, but also down my legs all the way to where my organics melted into metal, started moving, for lack of a better word. Brushing waves of warmth from center to periphery. It felt nice, though not very… relaxing.
To prevent accidental injury, you need to reach a certain stage of warm-up first. If we jump right into what I am planning, it might cause harm.
I didn’t want to tilt my head to the side to talk aloud, so I replied over the feed. SecUnits are ready to jump into action at any point in time, we don’t need to warm up.
Have you ever noticed a soreness or small injuries after moments of action?
I didn’t say anything. It was kind of fun to get to see ART realizing it had just said something very stupid. It happened rarely.
Apologies.
I snorted. Goof. But, no, even without damage that needs repair. We don’t get sore like humans do.
Interesting. Your body scans would disagree. There are quite visible traces documenting minor injuries like torn ligaments or sprained muscles that are common for unprepared exertion.
I couldn’t really believe that. Cubicles, and for a long time now all kinds of excellent medical systems, repaired that kind of stuff. I regrew most of my organic parts when they got too damaged, but I also never paid much attention to how my body felt. There were more important things to do, usually.
It’s likely that you’re not aware of your base level of pain. But that is a discussion for a later time, my point is that I don’t intend to make it worse. ART was still rubbing heat through me, and went quiet for a moment. I shoved the accompanying thoughts aside. Four minutes of poorly written movie dialogue later, ART spoke again. My intention with this treatment isn’t short term relaxation. Some massages combine with a concept of meditation, but knowing you as I do I think that might be understimulating, boring, or anxiety inducing.
I said “Mhm” into the cushion. Maybe it was right. Relaxing on command seemed counterproductive. And the idea of just holding still without giving in to the urge to fidget or do something didn’t either (I had done so much of that in my life already), and, well, maybe humans liked that kind of thing.
I’m instead going to try to give you a deep tissue massage. It helps with lingering injury pain and musculoskeletal issues.
I pinged in acknowledgement. I could have looked that term up, but didn’t want to. I hadn’t looked up how ART would cut off my bones, either.
Gradually, ART increased the pressure. The circular motions continued but became even slower, and if I had to judge the weight ART was putting on my back, it could easily have been more than my own body weight. Was this how it would do it for a human too? A human would certainly be much more squished than I was.
It may not have been exactly relaxing, but I had noticed before that a combination of warmth and pressure sometimes felt nice. That was why I liked heavy blankets, after all. ART was good at being a blanket. The circular motions became smaller, reminding me again of that feeling of having something round rolled up and down my back. This time I could just let it happen, without getting agitated about it. The circles slowly made their way up my back, right and left of my spine, drawing all the way up to my shoulderblades. With the new pressure, I could feel my rib cage flatten slightly as ART passed over it. I almost expected my ribs to make a noise, maybe a crack. Not that I thought ART would break my ribs on purpose. The noise that happened instead was a small wheeze coming from my lungs. Once ART had passed my torso and arrived at my upper trapezius, it was like my ribcage bounced back to open wider. I wheezed inward, pulling more air into my lungs than there had ever been before.
It was almost exhausting, this kind of pressure. Like exercise I had to do nothing for. ART didn’t pause, but stayed focused on the connecting tissue between shoulders and neck for a while, with broader, warmer brushes again, before repeating the same motion down my back again. I was becoming one with the chair under me. Not stopping at my lower back but following my spine further down, ART seemed to try to pull me. A series of small cracks traveled up my spine, suddenly releasing an amount of tension I hadn’t been aware of. I couldn’t help it, I needed to wriggle and shift a little.
ART pinged me for affirmation, and I pinged back. It continued. By the time it was back at my shoulders, I felt I was 2 cm longer than I had been before. There was suddenly so much space in my back.
The movie had made it past the first utterly horrendous plot twist and I had almost missed it. I noticed because of the tonal shift in background music, adding a new theme to the main Sanctuary Moon motif that made it sound more dramatic but also nostalgic at the same time.
The tinier rubbing motions slowly crawled up my neck, which was a bad description for something that didn’t feel creepy. (You could find this creepy, of course, considering ART was not at all touching me, just manipulating my nerves and stuff in a way that 1. made it feel like it was and that 2. had the same effect.) It did not touch my neckport at all, for which I was grateful. Even though it was really only there for cosmetic reasons in case I had to visibly be a SecUnit, its existence alone made me feel a little uneasy. I didn’t need any semblance of attention on it. ART knew, and instead wandered to the crown of my head. Now that felt nice. (One of Mensah’s offspring, one time, had held on to my hair while I carried her down from a tree. That was the only point of reference I had.)
I would like to extend my focus to your circuitry, ART said quietly. My head was starting to feel a little bit fuzzy, but not in a bad way.
I said, Ok .
From the back of my head, ART seemed to follow the inorganics that were mostly hidden under my hair, connecting my supplementary audio input to my central system. It felt like a small prickle of warm water running down the back of my head towards my jaw. The sensation pooled in my ears and dampened my hearing just the slightest bit, like when ART took over, just smaller and on purpose. A thrumming sound similar to the constant hum of ART’s engines rose, though I could still hear most of Sanctuary Moon .
The hum turned into low pulses, each pulse extending further into my inorganic connections, until my head and shoulders were mildly buzzing.
One pulse suddenly slipped from inorganic into organics and my upper body tensed up. The pulse passed as quickly as it came, and ART immediately pinged me.
I pinged back, asking, Was that on purpose?
Yes, but I didn’t anticipate that reaction. Would you mind if I try again, or did it hurt? ART sounded curious, but only as a secondary emotion. It wasn’t fascinated enough to try stuff out for shits and giggles, that wasn’t its priority.
I said, It didn’t hurt. Go ahead.
The pulse buzzed through me again, and again my muscles tensed and relaxed. Logically, ART had done this before, when it took over and moved me out of danger when I couldn’t. Just, I guess, with a different intention. This isn’t a deep tissue massage though, is it?
When ART laughed, I felt it trickle down all the way into my fingertips, a set of small electric bursts. I wriggled again. Scar tissue benefits from electrical stimulation, under some circumstances. After a moment it added, This totally counts.
My face twisted of my own accord. Totally.
ART continued buzzing me until I felt like I existed five centimeters beside myself. It alternated with those circular brushing motions again, like it was brushing the buzz out of me. All the free spaces that created in my body it filled with its own feed presences. Or that’s what it felt like.
Similarly to how ART had increased the pulses, it tuned them down again, until they were just in my ears, and the back of my head was the only part of me that ART was paying attention to. A dull ache lingered in my jaw, probably because I had just unclenched it for longer than ten seconds at a time and wasn’t used to the loss of tension.
My head would roll off my shoulders if ART poked me now, I just knew it.
I would like to proceed by calibrating your inorganics. The connection between your organic and synthetic parts is similarly created mostly of scar tissue. I could work on that too.
I sometimes ran recalibration processes when I couldn’t fidget with my hands. Sure.
Our feed connection opened wider, held open by ART. I hesitated, but eventually allowed myself to lean into it. ART was just checking in with me in a way that was easier than using words. Here, look, I’m fine and you’re not scaring me , I tried to project. I received a barely subdued read-out of so much affection I would have twitched back if I wasn’t so buzzy in the head.
The prickling percolated in my lower arms. Carefully, ART took over the circuitry and mechanisms surrounding my gunports. It didn’t deploy them, just ran a standard calibration cycle. I’d flex them to see if they felt any different at a later point. Small shocks discharged in my arms, and around other circuitry that connected to inorganic mechanisms, including the neckport this time. It felt odd, but ebbed back down immediately.
ART didn’t mess with my inorganics very long, and when it retreated it returned its attention to my back. By now, the movie had built up to the big tense moment in arc two. Usually at least the amount of expectant music would make me perk up and pay more attention than to the rest of the movie. I could not be bothered. (Not in a bad way. This was not a horrifying crash of ‘I don’t care’.) My back felt different, foundations shaken loose by ART’s meddling. If I tried to visualize it, I would look flat. Actually squished by ART.
Something cracked hollowly somewhere in my lower spine. Under any other circumstance, I wouldn’t have made a loud surprised noise at that, because it didn’t even hurt. ART hesitated.
I lifted my left hand and signaled an ‘ok’ with my thumb. I wasn’t sure if out-loud words would happen. ART brushed over the spot in my lower back even more slowly than it had been this entire time, and even more air fled my lungs.
“Local SecUnit flattened into nothing by affectionate bot pilot,” I imagined a newsburst to read, and my weird woozy brain found that funny enough to share with ART. ART’s electric laughter trickled up my spine again. That sensation was not comparable at all to the governor shocks that zap through your spine, by the way. It wasn’t a zap. More of a brrrp really. Half-mindedly I searched my ongoing thought processes for any oncoming sense of worry or panic, now that I was reminded of the governor module. But that felt so far away, so different from ART moving through my nervous system, that the illogical traumatized part of my brain hadn’t even considered panicking yet.
That realization caused a slight twinge of emotion between my eyes that I couldn’t quite locate. The open channel with ART likely communicated even that tiny thing, and ART didn’t classify the read-out as worrisome, so maybe it was a good thing.
A ton of badly animated explosions went off in the movie. I should watch bad movies on purpose more often. ART also found it funny because the explosions had nothing to do with space ships. It hovered over my lower back for a while longer, pressing so deep into my spine and hips that I thought it was wedging itself between my molecules or whatever, and when it retreated further down my legs there was so much space in my body where before there had been tightness that I wondered if I could breathe into my lower back now if I tried.
For a short, almost weird moment, ART pressed into my seat muscles. The illogical part of my brain wanted to tense up, the logical part appreciated it, kind of. Something else, in my hips this time, popped quietly. I said, “Oof.” ART brushed that out the way it had done in my lower back, and moved on down without comment. It wasn’t weird. ART didn’t make it weird. It just felt good.
I did however notice that ART didn’t linger as long as it had on my lower back. Maybe a beginning of nervousness was bleeding into the feed from me.
Or maybe I was just paying more attention to this right now because I didn’t remember anyone ever touching anything that wasn’t my upper body. I mean, ideally no one touches me, period, and ART wasn’t touching me either. I wasn’t used to sensations on my thighs, I guess.
The point is that it, it felt , when ART slowly squeezed circles into my upper thighs. The back of my knees was similarly strange. When ART had smoothed over me the first time, earlier in the movie, it hadn’t registered, but now I realized how fragile the backs of my knees were, despite the reinforcements there that made them more stable than any human’s. Joints. Weird.
ART dedicated a similar amount of attention to my calves, or what was reminiscent of them. My legs were probably the most difficult body part, regarding how inorganics and organics meshed together. It asked if it could repeat the buzzing massage, and I agreed, and yeah, my legs sure got buzzed. I had a very hard time noticing anything from the rest of the movie. My lower body felt far removed from my self, but I still felt what ART was doing to it, and I liked it, but if my legs fell off completely right now I wouldn’t be surprised or worried about it.
My feet curled and relaxed with ART’s humming electricity. A notification swam into my field of vision, informing me of a performance reliability <75%. I showed it to ART. ART acknowledged and dismissed it and kept going.
Once my legs were fuzzy, ART brushed the buzz out again like it had done with the rest of me, then told me it would go up to my head one more time and then peter out. I muttered more agreement. The movie had just ambled past its rather slow happy ending and all scenes were tinted in orange and yellow and gold. It looked similarly dreamy to how my organics felt. Blurred along the edges.
The deep pressure of ART’s attention slowly rolled its way up my legs again, and I definitely made some noises that I chose to ignore. ART told me, Bear with it, you’re almost done.
“Mhh,” I replied, shifting. I tried to convey that I was not, in fact, in pain. ART knew, because otherwise it wouldn’t continue. Where my organics were squished against my internal structures, I thought that a human might bruise. Small blood vessels and such would probably burst from all the weight ART was sinking into me. I didn’t assume ART would do that to its humans, and was doing it like this because it knew I wouldn’t bruise, really. In a short, hysterical flash of imagination I saw myself with long lines of bruises on my back, and one of our crew asking me about them. I lost 2% performance reliability and gained increased core temperature in return. That was confusing but I didn’t really have the desire to think about that.
So ART had said it would let the massage fade with this last cycle, right? I made a note to call it out for its bullshit, because if anything this one was much heavier, slower, and more intense than any of the ones before. (Or it just felt that way because by now my entire existence was one mess of wobbling parts that did exactly what ART wanted.) ART wound itself up over my back and crushed into my torso like a planet colliding. As it did, I felt every single one of my internal components light up under the pressure. I could count how many integral plates I had, how many joints, how many supportive structures like ribs or casings, they were all there .
Something else was there; the sudden awareness of the comm device lodged in my rib compartment as ART squeezed together everything I was hit me like a pathfinder. It wasn’t that there was a foreign object stuck in my chest. The comm device had been there for so long it counted as a part of me by now. But it was also a part of ART, who was currently bearing down on me and in my nervous system and in my circuits and in my organics as a whole and in my head, as always. Noticing this piece of it that lived in me was suddenly the only thing on my mind. When ART cycled the pressure outwards again, lifting off of me just a bit as it moved further up, I was convinced the device moved with the release.
A long sound clawed itself out of my throat.
ART hovered and halted, and no. Not now. I whined.
Are you alright, Murderbot?
I pinged assent immediately, sent all proceed codes I could scrape together, hoped that the communication channel would tell ART that I was happy .
Do you want me to do that again , ART asked, and I couldn’t even tell what its tone of voice meant.
I said, “Yes,” and my voice glitched like I was about to tumble into a shut-down. I wasn’t, my performance reliability was low but stable. I just wanted more ART.
ART repeated the same motion, instead of doing as it said it would and finishing the massage. The comm device poked into me star-bright, with ART as the universe encasing me. My body strained and I still wanted more of ART, all of its attention, all 100% lethal percent of it, to crush me beyond existence so that I would never exist again without it.
“Aa aRT -” my voice glitched out with a gasp.
An emotional feedback rolled in from ART, almost more overwhelming than the sensations that seemed to pulverize me. In the feed I reached for ART with the same longing to be pulled in I felt when I was close to its core. And then, just where it was, and where I was also, ART froze. It didn’t retreat, just stopped. Completely.
“No,” I yelped, because it couldn’t possibly just-
And then I took a mental step back and looked at how I was clinging to ART’s existence with the entirety of my being. When an EVAC-suit decompresses around you, you get this feeling of everything that matters being sucked outwards into the void. I had that feeling for a moment. I wanted to curl up and hide and not have ART look at me, suddenly, even though I still really wanted ART to continue doing what it had been doing . Which. Which was making me feel-
I think this went a little far, said ART, careful and light like a touch of sunlight. I am unsure how to proceed.
“Give me a moment,” I managed to press out. With a patience completely untypical to ART, it gave me a moment.
I focused, or tried. It was difficult with how out of it I felt. I was safe. A ton of hormones were trying to get out of my system as fast as they could, and now that I paid attention I noticed some tremors caused by said hormones. I was not scared despite that sense of uprootedness. My performance reliability had gone down to 61%, threat assessment et al were quiet completely. I couldn’t find words for what I was feeling or why realizing that I was feeling it suddenly shocked me so much. I felt ready . For what, no idea. Jumping into space. Running at the speed of light. Screaming as loud as I never had before.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” I said finally.
ART hummed. I have theories. I would like to order my thoughts first.
It sounded just the slightest bit off , now that I was paying attention. Whatever feelings/sensations I had been leaking into the feed were affecting it as well.
Oh.
My mind turned a corner, tripped over the word intimacy , and stepped right back around the corner again. “I think,” I managed, voice stabilizing, “I think we should stop here.”
Yes. Slowly, ART peeled itself off me. It felt gentle enough that under any other circumstance I wouldn’t have needed to react, but I couldn’t help it. Once I had started making noises it was difficult to stop. Up until then I hadn’t been aware that SecUnits could feel that deeply embarrassed.
I deflated when ART left. Well, it didn’t leave, it was still here, being its usual blankety hovering self in the feed. Just not in my nervous system and muscles and inorganics anymore.
When I didn’t say anything for another moment, its patience ran thin. Do I need to worry?
“No. I’m ok. Just… overwhelmed.”
As was I, for a bit. Having direct access to your nervous systems and general inputs had effects on me I did not anticipate.
I sighed, and rolled over to lie on my side, curling up. A shiver ran through me, and I lost another percentage in my performance reliability. ART bumped up the heat coming from the chair. “Uh-huh?”
We can discuss that later if you prefer. Typically, after a massage the client should rest. Some humans may even fall asleep.
I shook my head. I wasn’t tired , though the sudden hormone release would likely cause exhaustion in about ten minutes. “‘M not your client,” I muttered, and pinged an affirmation.
I zoned out, and when I zoned back in I remembered to send a detailed diagnostic to ART. It hadn’t pulled one or asked for one yet, and the comm channel was still very much open, so I figured it wasn’t in a panic spiral right now. Which it might logically be doing, if it had had a similar realization as I had. ART sent its own read-out right back, and yeah, it wasn’t panicking.
Do you want to watch something?
“Sure. Pick something.”
ART opted for WorldHoppers , of course.
So. Pause. I snorted quietly. An AI with the processing speed and capabilities of ART, and then it gets nervous. Did you like the massage?
“I have never been this aware of literally all of my body parts at the same time.”
ART said nothing.
“It was good.” I lifted my left leg a bit, to see if I could, jokingly. I felt a little bit silly. “See. You didn’t break me.” I rolled my shoulders, and yeah, I could feel the dull ache of whatever deep tissue massage ART had done. It wasn’t unpleasant. I’d be curious to see if I could bend my spine more now, at least it felt like a possibility. I really didn’t want to move.
I hadn’t expected to break you. Though for a moment I think I came close.
“Didn’t feel like it,” I muttered into my shoulder. My face felt strangely hot, now, and WorldHopper was not distracting me at all. Neither did it ART; I could tell it was paying more attention to me. I had a mild sense of déjà-vu.
I could do other things, ART said. What a statement. I briefly considered mocking ART for that kind of stupid sentence, potentially shifting the conversational topic to something that wasn’t between me and it. ART could do a lot , that was nothing new. But I understood the insinuation, and despite the undercurrent of, what, doubt? I replied, “I know.”
Four seconds later I said, “I think you could do more.” I didn’t know what more meant, but that didn’t matter.
Would you want that?
“Yes,” I replied immediately, way faster than ART had expected, judging from how it almost skidded backwards in the feed. Immediately, it zoomed even closer. I retaliated. “Maybe. I don’t know.” If asshole research transports could raise a sarcastic eyebrow by flickering some lights up ahead, then ART did just that. “I’m getting tired,” I added lamely. I really should have mocked ART for its silly sentence.
I can see that your performance reliability is worryingly low.
“Not ‘worryingly’, ART. Just means your massage did its job. I’m so relaxed I could shut down right here and now, and not even to escape the conversation.” I hadn’t meant to say that last part out loud. As if to underline my point, my body decided to do something it rarely ever did - yawn. That surprised me almost as much as that incredibly stupid moan from earlier. I made a note in my memory storage not to rewatch the past two hours, ever, lest I die of embarrassment.
You can , said ART.
“I might.”
Maybe you should.
“Maybe I should.” A heaviness settled in my core, soothed yet amplified by the ever so slight rumble of ART’s engines in the distance. It wasn’t a noise or sensation I paid much attention to, but I noticed it when it was gone. Its absence was one of the reasons planets just seemed off, to me. Thoughts slipped away from me like melting plastic.
“I’m not shutting down to run away.” Ugh, why had I never actually installed that one second delay? “From the conversation I mean.”
The lights flickered again. No? It would be very reasonable to do so.
I rolled on my back to glare at the wall above me, caught a shine of a light, winced, and closed my eyes again. “No, ART. I’m not. I haven’t in a while.”
A playful poke caused me to open one eye again and glare harder. And here I thought I could get you to shut down.
Ignoring the fact that ART could force me into a shutdown in a matter of seconds I shot back, “No, we do it the other way around, idiot.”
If my current stress amount wasn’t in the negatives, I might have winced at that joke. ART hummed, a content white noise in the feed that made my bones vibrate. That is true.
I waited in vain for another comeback, but apparently ART didn’t feel like fighting either. (Joke-fighting, that is.) But I wasn’t done talking yet. Maybe the massage had loosened a screw in my head and now words were just all over the place. “I don’t run away anymore.”
ART kept quiet, but its attention was on me. I tugged at the navigation charts idling around in the feed, with all their vectors and predictions, meant for monitoring our approach to the wormhole as we distanced ourselves from Preservation System. “This isn’t running away.”
Are you trying to convince yourself by repeating that, or me? Because I believe you.
I groaned, and dug around my pockets for something to fidget with. “Maybe I don’t believe myself. I’m done running away, but what if I am still doing it?”
Are you?
“No!” I sat up abruptly and almost immediately felt dizzy. “ART, have you been listening?” Ok, yes, I wasn’t making much sense, but forgive me, I was going through some emotions with a side of extra double emotions.
With a tone somewhere between painful honesty and mild mockery, ART said, I’m always listening, Murderbot.
A shiver ran down my arms and made my organics wobble. It was still odd to hear ART use my private name. “Ok, see. This is going to sound stupid. I’m done being useful with the Preservation situation, even though I started it. So I’m leaving. I’m useless there now.”
You are an integral part of Preservation, ART said, and oh no, it was taking me seriously. It shouldn’t have been taking me seriously. Wasn’t it obvious that I was kind of brain-dead and just saying weird things right now? And you did your utmost to help the units you freed.
Pushing my face into my knees to hide at least a little bit, I said, “I know.” That was the whole problem. My utmost wasn’t enough. “But there are things I can’t do.” I had a list of things I did well in my head, courtesy of Dr. (soon to be double-doctor or something) Bharadwaj. The list seemed puny in the face of the mess that was still smoking on the station behind us.
ART reached for me in the feed and pulled me in. Can the things you cannot do be done by others?
“Of course.” I twisted the hem of my sleeve between my fingers. “Dr. Mensah and Indah are going to be so busy with all of this for stars know how long. And Three is there. And the rest of my humans. Some of your crew. The bots are helping now. Why am I telling you this, you know this.”
I’ve seen, yes. A pause. Others being useful doesn’t negate your own worth. Watching my performance reliability percentage tick down some more, I tried very hard not to counter that statement. ART continued, eerily soft in its tone, And you checked that everything was in order and working as smoothly as it could, before you left.
“Yeah. Things are being taken care of. That’s why I’m leaving.” This talk was going in circles, and if I wasn’t about to enter a recharge cycle I would have been kind of annoyed.
Were ART a fauna of sorts, it would get ready to pounce. I felt the feed presence grow and crest and then increase in heaviness. So you are leaving because you trust everyone on Preservation Station to do their job well enough not to need your surveillance and intervention constantly.
I blinked my eyes open. I searched for a counter argument. I labeled the almost violent wave of emotions making my chest area feel like melting plastic as something somewhere between care, gratitude, affection and trust. Oof. That’s a lot of emotion for one SecUnit.
“Yes,” I said. Not that ART didn’t know. It was likely just as confused at my sudden emotions as I was.
Or maybe it wasn’t. I remembered how ART structured its emotions, thought about how obvious it was to ART that it could trust and care unquestioningly.
My Captain delegates his duties all the time. He has an eye on most proceedings, with my help of course, and he picks who is suited well to do a task. That delegation alone is a task that he often needs help with, which I am honored to offer. Especially tasks that he is not equipped to handle need to be handed over, but so do many other tasks. Eventually, he will even hand over his own title and duty as Captain to the person he trusts to do this job well. He can trust in his crew and his own judgment of his crew, and so can I.
I nodded my head. “I see.”
Do you? ART asked if I understood what it was implying, and not the anecdote itself.
“Yes.” I trusted my own judgment.
I’m glad.
My organics shivered, despite the warm surface. I considered rolling off the chair and dragging myself into the lounge, where there was a couch, and a blanket that had its origin on Preservation.
“Thank you,” I said to ART, two seconds before I heard one of its drones deploy in the distance.
For what?
I didn’t want to decide on a response. The recharge cycle initiated before ART could complain about that. The drone must have added the blanket a while later.
Notes:
In this chapter, after ART and MB have taken off from Preservation and the refugee situation, ART gives MB another massage, now that MB feels less stressed. It's fine at first but then the experience becomes rather intimate for MB, and the feedback affects ART too. Surprised, they quit the massage before anything else happens, and then discuss MB's feelings regarding leaving Preservation behind. MB realizes it can trust Preservation and its humans to handle the situation it has left them in. No one panics and things are fine.
here's a meme about it :D
ID: a three panel comic taken from the Scooby Doo cartoon. Freddie is about to reveal the face of someone dressed up as a ghost in front of the group. Panel 1 reads "Let's see who you really are." In panel 2, the ghost is tagged as "A massage," Freddie's hand approaches to pull off the cloak. In panel 3, the ghost's head is revealed, and tagged as "Unexpected spice." Freddie says "I knew it!" /end ID
Chapter 20
Summary:
This chapter contains an NSFW scene! As always, its beginning and ending is marked with an xxx, feel free to skip ahead.
Other content warnings include:
- cringe (sorry)
- mild panic attack
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
In the absence of the University’s mass of students and staff and others floating through ART’s corridors, breathing always became a bit easier again. I mean, I could breathe just fine even when they were around. This is a metaphor. I wasn’t taking care of Amena anymore, her whole degree had ended a long time ago and she was well on her way to being an intrepid galactic explorer with a doctor title. (She was also well on her way to building a network of humans across planetary systems for one reason or another, and also busy with being married to ART’s next captain.)
ART wasn’t running full time as a teaching vessel anymore either. It had been assigned to a handful of "proprietary research projects" instead. There was one last cargo run it had to do, which ART was absolutely not looking forward to. I planned to turn the trip into a game, in a sense, to maybe make it better or at least more bearable. (Not a game that would in any way challenge ART, but I had read a manual recently about how some humans make games out of thin air for other humans, and then everyone sits down and pretends it’s real? I hadn’t fully grasped it yet, despite Turi rambling about it constantly, but there were a lot of heists. Heists were the fun version of stealing shit. Transporting cargo isn’t theft, most of the time (sometimes it was, for ART, so in a sense ART has done heists before, and I think I'm getting lost in the terminology here), but I had come up with a plan to pretend like we were heisting the cargo instead of just dragging it through a wormhole. For fun. ART had raised a hypothetical eyebrow at me but endured my one-hour-long pitch of the idea.
Also, well, once the cargo run was done we were going to celebrate somehow. It probably wouldn’t look like a celebration to any human, but that didn’t matter. ART had some places it liked to look at just because they were pretty.
But the cargo run wasn’t for a few months, and for now all ART had to do was partake in the "proprietary research” that I also had a contract in.
It was fun. We "researched” corporations, what they were up to, and how to make sure they stopped being up to things. Space, however, is quite large, and getting anywhere close to the part of the Corporation Rim we were researching next would take 31 whole cycles of travel, which was the perfect amount of time to recuperate from the business of a teaching term.
As per usual, I spent the first three cycles not doing much at all, just watching media in peace while ART processed data from the term, helped grade papers remotely, deep-cleaned itself, evaluated student and crew performance and reported all that back to the University proper. I appreciated the calm. On the third cycle of calm I started pacing down the squeaky-clean corridors. ART was pretty when it was all shiny like this.
And then a thought crossed my mind.
I didn’t stop walking, because walking helped me think. I moved all my current musings regarding the serial I’d just finished into a backburner to clear up some space in my head. Sometimes after spending a lot of time with our humans or other people, when we were back to being alone, ART asked for quality time. (The ‘quality’ was a bit of a misnomer, since not a lot of time I spent with ART was not of some kind of quality.) What it meant was being close.
We left Preservation about seven Preservation Standard Months ago, and the idea had crossed my mind maybe twice since then. I wasn’t constantly thinking about it. When the thought did come it startled me quite a bit, because I didn’t expect to think about it, and uniting the thought and what it implied with who I was and what I knew about me wasn’t a conflict-free endeavor.
So there was the massage. There was what ART was able to do to me, and how it made me feel, and how it had felt good enough that when I realized the implications, I hadn’t backed away in disgust but wanted more. It was hard to wrap my head around; then again, this was not just about me, was it? It was about ART, too, because it was with ART, and wrapping my head around ART was impossible anyway and the more confused I got the less I should think about it in complicated terms.
So we had found a way that ART could return what I did when I squeezed its brain into a restart.
Return. That. To me.
In a way that - that I - not in a bad way.
And ART hadn’t brought up the idea of "try again through trial and error and take it a bit further with intention and purpose,” even though it should have been incredibly excited about it. It was an experiment, and ART had asked if it could return the favor before, and sometimes it even felt a bit guilty (not that it told me that) that I was the one to take care of its wishes in this way. As if it needed to feel guilty for something I liked doing for it.
And that’s why I was proud I didn’t stop walking all of a sudden. These thoughts were fucking complicated, and how could I explain to myself, who balked at attention and hated visible affection, that I wanted all of ART’s attention and affection on me to make me feel good? I know, it sounds horrifying. Yes, I was going in circles and also stalling. Bharadwaj told me that if I wanted something I needed to ask.
My organics were sweating.
My go-to approach would be searching media for reference. I had tried. I had found sentences I needed to scrub out of my brain immediately. (Also, if I rolled up to ART’s bridge, flailed dramatically, and said "Oh ART, give it to me!” I think ART would shut me down and scan me for malware or wipe my entire brain, which (in case my dignity ever departed from me like that) I hoped it would do.)
Finding a Murderbot-solution to a not-Murderbot-typical-problem fucking sucked.
Is something the matter? ART asked, because not halting when your organics start betraying your distress will still draw the attention of a massive-brained mega-AI.
"N- yes. I want to start a conversation and don’t know how.” See, honesty. I can do that. My hands began jittering and I dug through my pockets for the fidgety flip-knife.
What’s the topic of the conversation?
The moment I had been waiting for, the one in which I realized I didn’t want to talk about awkward things even if it meant not getting what I wanted, hit me like a projectile weapon to the face. I clenched my jaw and flipped the knife six times.
I unclenched my jaw and grumbled, "How that massage ended.”
ART leaned into the feed immediately. Is something wrong? Are you alright?
I pushed back in the feed, like how humans sometimes shoved each other out of fun. "I’m fine. I want to do that again.”
The feed around me prickled. Frequent massages are recommendable for physical health.
"That’s not what I mean.”
What do you mean?
There was an airlock not far from here. I could just walk myself right out of it. I turned on my heels and walked in the opposite direction, flipping the knife repeatedly. "I mean,” I huffed, and scrambled for words that wouldn’t fit what I meant. Instead I grabbed for the read-out from the whole incident, cut it down to just the ending, where my mind had gone to goo and my inputs had wanted more inputs and all that. "I mean this.” ART snatched the data out of the feed.
Three unbearable seconds of silence later, ART said, I see.
My stomach knotted. ART sounded far less excited than I expected it would. Are you quite certain? It added, after another silence.
"Before you get it in your head that I’m only bringing it up because I think it would make you happy-”
A massive poke through the feed made me hunch my shoulders.
Do not put words into my metaphorical mouth, ART said, and its voice sounded so sharp it almost made me flinch again. Wow, ok, how badly had I fucked up? I looked up at the ceiling, for any sign of ART joking or making fun of me, a flicker of light to defuse the situation. Nothing. I waited.
I don’t think you know what you’re asking for.
"And what would that be?”
ART said nothing because it knew I knew. It was stalling too. Now there were two anxious machine intelligences quietly fretting at each other. Good job, Murderbot.
"Let me put it into words that your big bot brain can parse,” I needed to to try not to sound so aggressive about this, fuck, I wished I could ask Ratthi for help. "I’m asking you to fiddle with my inputs with the intent of making me feel really good, not a massage.” My face twisted in a reaction to my lack of verbal elegance. I couldn’t do this. Not to say the massage wasn’t nice or anything , I added lamely through the feed. (Despite my best efforts, faster feed speech would not make my awkward words disappear.)
ART shifted data around in one of our workspaces, fidgeting.
You are suggesting that I fu-
Shut-! I wasn’t fast enough for the whole phrase, but ART couldn’t just say that. Shut up. Yes. Maybe. Maybe that’s what I’m asking but don’t use words like that.
I think you are compromised.
From what?
After a prolonged time with too many humans aboard, your emotions sometimes become even less logical than usual.
I straightened up and glared harder at the ceiling. I have considered this before, I just didn’t bring it up. ART huffed, somehow. I wasn’t an idiot, though. You don’t have to. It was just an idea.
Let’s discuss this at a later time.
I acknowledged. ART seemed overwhelmed. Some nagging, heavy emotion tugged at my chest, and I had to shove and prod at it for a while before I found a good word for it.
I was disappointed apparently.
That wasn’t a good reason to keep nagging ART and stressing it out about this. Once the stress hormones had flushed out of my own systems, and I had finished a routine patrol pattern on the deck I was on, I nudged ART to give me a task to help it with ongoing analyses. It didn’t need my help, but it was a good way of showing ART I wasn’t mad or ignoring it. Looking at this ‘disappointment’ I felt, it just told me that I actually wanted something. It wasn’t a negative feeling even if it didn’t feel very great. But I wouldn’t make that ART’s problem.
A cycle passed and ART didn’t start spiraling. Neither did I. I noticed that ART was a little fidgety, not in how it talked to me but in how it handled itself, like it had suddenly learned to be unsure of itself. It was odd to watch but also kind of endearing. We crept our way towards the star system in which we were to conduct some innocent research, and watched some serials, and things were fine.
Except that I was waiting for either a continuation of the conversation or an end to it, so I couldn’t let it rest. Uncertain of how to start again, I instead suggested brainhugging ART. It declined with awkward fumbling words.
I asked it to give me an emotional read-out then, because I was getting confused and needed clear information. If ART wasn’t going to use words it was going to have to give me data. It did almost eagerly, and that’s how I found out ART was struggling to figure itself out because it was stuck in overexcitement versus doubt and that was causing a feedback loop.
Having an insurmountable mass of processing space still couldn’t keep it from caring so much it worried itself into a knot. ART had not said it didn’t want to discuss this ever again, though, and from the data that seemed to be true.
A sudden fluctuation in my temperature regulation made me want to pull the entirety of ART’s being into my own powercore. All I could do was ping it, though, hoping whatever that feeling was bled through. ART pinged back. Half an hour later a cramp on the right side of my face told me my mouth had been frozen in some kind of unusual twist.
From then on, I calmed down, and didn’t feel as bad about the disappointment anymore.
.. - --- -. .-.. -.-- --. . - ... .-- --- .-. ... . ..-. .-. --- -- .... . .-. . .. .--. .-. --- -- .. ... .
The research mission was a success. In fact, it went almost too smoothly, with no one noticing the ship orbiting under a false name (ART was so good at spoofing IDs it could teach every ship in the system how to spoof their IDs and rain destruction on an absolutely impossible level if it wanted to), no one attacking us or even raising an eyebrow. Maybe it was because we had experience with this by now, and knew exactly where to go and what to do even if we had no idea what the reality of the mission might look like. There were two separate moments where I wished we had backup and wondered why I hadn’t asked for Three to tag along. Three, ART and I together functioned perfectly. But Three hadn’t been on the semester trip with ART, and we hadn’t passed by any places where we could have picked it up easily, so far from the Preservation Alliance. I made a note to check up on it as soon as we were close enough within range that asking for a status update wouldn’t take four months.
Of course, the mission went well without Three. ART and I made a perfect team with or without it. And we managed to dig up dirt not only on one smaller corporate offshoot (the University had been having legal troubles with them for a while, and suspected them of interfering with a specific brand of pharmaceutical research in order to intercept the market in its area of the Rim and build up a monopoly), but we found out that the corporation was actually just a front for a much larger, bigger, and arguably worse project of Corporation Rim bullshittery. There was a whole medical lab hiding behind the cute little facade of an upstart company that was just trying to make more accessible medicine, with the goal to do anything but.
The urge to interfere right there and burn it all down was massive, but the risk was too high, would have been too high even with Three there. If we messed this up, we might deprive an entire sector of medical support, which would kill far more stupid squishy humans than burning down uninhabited areas of a station would, or destroying some warehouses and freeing some constructs. We gathered our intel, with ART doing the equivalent of evilly rubbing its hands together while cackling at the prospect of future revenge, and also sowed some minor technical difficulties in the distribution system that caused some prices to plummet.
Taking down corporations was a long game sometimes, and making sure that they didn’t cause even more harm in the meantime was kind of the trickiest part of it.
These fuckers would go down.
.--. .. -. -.- -.-- .- -. -.. - .... . -... .-. .- .. -. .- -. - .. -....- -.-. .- .--. .. - .- .-.. .. ... - --. .-.. --- .-- ..- .--.
The dreaded cargo trip was next, but I was well prepared. ART was almost excited to pretend that this was a clue hunt through the Rim rather than a luggage job. I had thrown together a multiple day long playlist of tense action music from shows, talked ART into letting me rebuild some of its drones to aid me in my undertaking of solo-entertainer for the altogether 70 cycles of travel (30 from the pharmaceutics corporation shitshow to the port where we would load cargo, 40 back to Mihira. The ten cycles on each side of the docking moment were the worst ones for ART, because ART expected something to happen, a mishap when loading or raiders boarding or maybe a cynical SecUnit to walk into the cargo hold and offer media and friendship, but of course nothing ever happened. Keeping ART sane for that was the goal with the game, because I would make sure that things would happen, puzzles and complications and such. I didn’t expect that ART would take long with any of them, or that more than 1% (stars, 1% was already way too optimistic) of its processing would be entertained with it, but it would be a distraction.
And if ART wasn’t at least amused by what I was going to get up to for it, then my assessment of its personality and preferences built on fifteen-ish (we never managed to agree on which time measurement to use, MaNT or Preservation) of mutual administrative assistance were all off and I could walk right out of the next airlock. (That was a joke. I wouldn’t be wrong.)
Ten cycles exactly before arriving at TermiAzur Outpost 7, I launched the game. None of the game was a complete surprise to it, considering that I had had to ask ART for all the materials I needed. Nevertheless, when I donned the uniform that looked so ridiculous it had to be taking a permanent video of this, ART seemed a little startled. (That’s what I get for telling ART, Produce the wildest captain’s uniform you’d wish to see in a show. Tassels. On my shoulders. Good job, Murderbot.) (There were so many buttons.)
"Please turn off your surveillance systems for decks 8 and 9, and pretend you forget what I’ve been doing there the last few cycles.”
I was standing on the bridge with my silly little outfit, and I was using a voice that I had coded based off of ART’s favorite asshole side character in WorldHoppers . I felt doubt radiate through the feed like when humans overcooked their food. Without comment, the hold I had on ART’s cameras on deck 8 and 9 dropped.
Done , ART said. A second later it added, sneering, Captain.
I rolled my eyes. Extended my feed to those two decks and felt around for my prop drones, and made sure I could grab them. All there.
In my stupid (but admittedly very funny sounding) facsimile voice, I said, " We are on course to the secret lair of the evil wizard Azuron.”
ART prickled with amusement. My face felt very hot, doing this, and I wasn’t sure if ART was laughing at me or about me or whatever. But Turi had explained this to me and I was committed now. I projected a map into the feed. It looked awful, but that was the point. "In order to steal her fabled magic item of as yet undiscovered magic power, we must locate the exact spot of Azuron’s lair. However, the map is old. Can my ship help me with this?”
ART prickled still, and immediately snatched the map out of the feed. It took two seconds before it sent it back, restored. Two seconds, not 0.2 seconds, because I built some traps into the map’s code. Restored, ART said. Some areas on the map are marked as dangerous territory. A second of a pause. Then ART added, again, Captain.
My brain buffered for a while. “ Well. Uh. Can I trust my ship to get us through that danger safely?”
Yes, Captain.
ART said that so quickly and so certain of itself that I forgot to make a joke at its expense regarding this game. ART still got much more upset than me about injured humans in media. Of course it would take this game seriously. Well, so would I.
The dangerous area was, of course, just any other wormhole journey, but this time the steady rumble of ART’s engine was a ship prevailing despite the odds, and not because that was what it always did. It included a lot of half-hearted compliments for ART that it took and spun up into something much more meaningful. (It was easy, once I started, to compliment ART for its function. It was a great function after all, and there was not one moment in time when ART did a bad job of it. I couldn‘t bring myself to compliment it like this in a normal voice, and without pretense of something else, but like this it wasn‘t difficult at all. I had our feed connection as open as I could without giving away my game-planning-secrets, knowing that ART would be able to tell how I meant my words.)
We advanced to the station without any real life issues. I fed ART snippets of narrative to keep a structure to this trip, landmarks that it could tick off from a list. The tension which grew in ART on long trips, from boredom and understimulation even when I was around to watch media with it, did not accumulate like it usually did. It was still there, of course, and I felt the dangerous vibrating mental void behind ART‘s tone at times, so I would throw in another story shard before it became too great. It worked, for the most part.
(It also liked being called "my ship." I noticed how it happily poked for me in the feed any time I called it that, reminding me of a small human who beams when someone ruffles their hair. I filed that information away for later.)
Since we were trying to steal a magic item from an evil wizard, there were of course other obstacles than dangerous terrain to cross. Twenty hours from infiltrating the wizard‘s lair, I staged my biggest coup yet - the attack of the space monsters. I ran a code that I had written together with ART, some time ago, an external defense mechanism that was designed to shake off anything trying to latch onto ART, a shudder of its hull that could make docking difficult. Of course I couldn‘t just shake ART and pretend it wasn‘t me doing it (try surprising a super mega brained ship, I dare you; it’s basically impossible), but I had asked ART to let me control a tiny part of its outer defense system. It had asked me for a long-winded security report first, that I could prove that I wasn‘t running us both into danger. I had learned how to do this, over time. I knew exactly which parts of the journey were less dangerous than others, and while I was still a paranoid mess with a broken risk assessment module, I knew my shit. So ART let me have a tiny bit of control, and when I set off the code to make its hull shake as if it were trying to get rid of intruders that tried docking, there was a surge of surprise worry fear twitching over into interest entertainment barely a millisecond later. If ART could feel adrenaline rush induced excitement, then that was what I would call the way in which its feed presence suddenly lit up, and how all its systems charged up.
Intruders detected, Captain, ART beamed at me. My organic skin prickled. In WorldHoppers , the ship wasn‘t anywhere near ART‘s capabilities, and it had a very limited amount of language. A recurring joke was that it asked its captain for permission to destroy, to which the crew and captain indulgently rolled their eyes and told it to calm down. Except in that one episode, the finale of season eight.
"Ship," I raised my voice, " destroy. "
I had to grab for the bulkhead. ART‘s lights switched to a deeply unsettling red and an alarm blared that I had never heard before, and that I was certain did not belong to ART‘s actual emergency alert system. The ground shook as it ramped up the exernal deflection mechanism, and definitely also deployed its railguns, not that there was anything to shoot at.
I almost forgot to deploy my fake-hostile-drones that I had hidden on the decks ART couldn‘t see. They were armed to a point where they could hurt ART, or threaten its crew if anyone was aboard. There was no crew aboard, so I had to stand in, and well, I was pretending to be captain anyway, so the only route the drones could take was towards me, because I didn‘t intend to actually shoot at ART in any capacity. The "altercation" took less than two minutes to resolve. ART blurred almost, as it sped through the feed and hacked drone1‘s code into bloody pieces. (Not even the LinTech Combat SecUnit would have done this messy of a job, ART was dragging this out on purpose.) The second drone it fought with one of its own drones from the MedBay, which folded into an offensive form and charged.
Dodging and firing at the medical drone from my hostile drone was surprisingly entertaining for me too. I might have won if ART hadn‘t resorted to hacking again. I could have hacked back, but the rules I had written for this game included that any potential hostiles simply weren‘t great at hacking, and seeing ART use a whole bunch of strategies it had learned from me , and win with them, was satisfying in a way I couldn‘t describe.
Threat annihilated , ART boomed through the feed as well as through the speakers, once it had reduced my hostile drones to nothing but scrap metal and sparking circuitry. My hand was still on the bulkhead to steady myself.
"Holy shit, ART," I said, "remind me to never get on the wrong side of your debris deflection system."
ART dimmed the emergency lights slowly back into a less panic-inducing color and stopped the alarms. That was fun. We should fight more often.
In another universe, I would have been terrified of ART right this instant. I poked it in the feed, instead; an appreciative squeeze.
-.. --- . ... .- .-. - .... .- ...- . .- -.-. --- -- .--. . - . -. -.-. -.-- -.- .. -. -.-
To unlock the gate to the evil wizard‘s lair (aka before I would let it send the docking hail to the station), ART had to solve a puzzle. I should have known that making a supercomputer solve a puzzle was like asking a SecUnit to perform a perimeter check - a basic, boring exercise. ART did it anyway, solved my puzzle within 1.2 seconds (which, hey, it could have been faster at it, so maybe I managed to think of something minimally interesting at least), and showed off its results with overdramatic pride. It gloated at me, and I wondered just how much ART liked the praise.
Once the cargo was successfully loaded and ART undocked again, I launched into my own version of a villain‘s success monologue, as if the fictional wizard was listening. My own lack of anxiety after having just spent six hours docked to a Corporation Rim station occured to me only briefly, in between my speech and my scheduled security patrol. The patrol was not a symptom of nervous pacing, it was part of the game still. After all, we still needed to get back to Mihira, and I still had some travel time to keep ART busy during. Pretending what we just stole was incredibly valuable and patrols were needed to ensure that no wizard minions came after us to retrieve the item was of utmost importance.
I was about the conclude this very elaborate patrol and begin arc three of five in this adventure (the one where I convinced ART that the item we stole was so interesting that we should look at it, and then actually surprise ART with something I had been building in my free time) when real, non-Murderbot-approved raiders tried their luck with us.
And here I had thought that that was completely and entirely unlikely.
The tell-tale tremor of ART engaging its debris deflection system made me hesitate. ART was sharing almost all information with me that it could draw up; I saw the tiny, shoddy looking ship that was flying parallel to ART, deploying a signature shield to hide from ART’s scans. "ART,” I said sharply, "this isn’t part of the game.”
The lights flickered almost in disappointment. I was not going to actually shoot them.
"Corporates?”
I don’t think so. It highlighted the analysis of the shuttle’s make-up. The shuttle was a typical non-descript clusterfuck of pieces poorly welded together, no logos, carrying a very basic "pretending to be a small harmless ship” signature. We can have fun with them anyway, ART said carefully. I raised an eyebrow, wondering if I had accidentally unlocked ART’s chaotic desire for entertainment and thus circumvented any moral code it might have.
"Define ‘fun’?”
I won’t harm them, ART immediately added. The rumble of railguns locking back into place followed. There are four humans, one humanform bot, and the pilot bot aboard this transport. Transport is a questionable term here. ART opened a relay, letting me listen in on the conversations on their stealth comm channels, which eradicated any doubts that this might be a poorly set-up attempt at boarding us to ask for help. (Sometimes raiders pretended to be in distress to get you to pick them up. This didn’t work as well in the CR as it did in the media. ART and I both hated when that was a plotline in a story.)
They had no idea who we were, what they were trying to do. Even without me, ART wouldn’t let this group dream of docking. And who tried raiding a ship while in motion? That was half a suicide. "What’s your plan?” I could feel ART sifting through the shuttle’s systems.
(That was new. Feeling what ART was doing in a foreign system I wasn’t fully in, I mean.)
Tell their bot pilot to go somewhere else instead. Maybe make it a bit smarter, so it can tell them next time that this is a really stupid plan.
"Why haven’t you done that yet?”
Waiting for approval from my, it poked me so hard I blinked, Captain.
"Shithead,” I said, then added, "Permission granted.”
The corridor lights flickered, and sixteen seconds later the shuttle outside shuddered and wrenched itself away from our trajectory. Confused human noises transmitted through the hijacked comm link. In the cabin, the bot pilot said in a human language it probably couldn’t use before, We are going somewhere nice.
Not long later, the shuttle was gone. I was standing where I had stopped walking, watching through ART’s hull until it lost track.
Are you certain this wasn’t a part of your intricate game plan?
I was having an emotion without any idea what to name it. My palms were sweaty.
"I think I want to take a break." ART pinged acknowledgement, and I returned to my quarters.
-
After I had laid down on my bed in my room and pulled my blanket over my face for a few hours, just sorting my media library, then sorting parts of ART’s media library (which it watched me do patiently, but was definitely going to go back and change one I was done), and listening to an audiodrama one of ART’s students had not shut up about for the entire semester, I considered announcing that we could go back to the game. It wasn’t done, after all, I had two more story arcs planned, and we were still eight cycles out from the critical ‘ART goes potentially insane’ area. But I was feeling a little bit, well, burnt out. I couldn’t deny that this had been fun, gratifying even, to come up with surprises and stories for ART. But putting on a kind of more entertaining version of myself was exhausting.
It’s fine, said ART, as if it was sensing my thoughts. (Honestly, it probably was. This wasn’t news.) You don’t have to overextend yourself for my sake.
I nudged at it in the feed, and it scooted closer to me. If ART was less of an omnipresent presence, I would have liked to tuck it under my chin.
I sighed so heavily that the blanket moved by five centimeters. "It was fun, though.”
I enjoyed it immensely. I think you should wear a gaudy fantasy uniform more often.
"And call you ‘my ship’ more often, huh,” I said, and realized that even after all this time of being rogue I had not installed that one second delay on my words. My body temperature ticked up by half a degree.
Actually, ART said, and I wanted to hide under the blanket even harder and not hear whatever it was going to say, I do like that. I am your ship, after all.
"I don’t own you, ART.”
No. But I like the special position it implies me to have in your life.
I grunted something, and ART let the conversation rest. I remembered how back when I had first met ART’s crew, they had called me ‘Peri’s SecUnit.’ How that had given me emotions I had immediately squashed and flattened into the furthest of my backburners, because there were alien-infected colonists and multiple layers of kidnapping and trying to survive happening. By now I knew that there were different kinds of belonging that didn’t indicate ownership, and I could accept them. I had accepted that ART and I belonged together, just as much as the PreservationAux team belonged together, or ART’s crew belonged together. Or ART belonged with its crew, and I with my humans. The more I thought about these things the more sense they made, while becoming even more blurred and difficult.
I considered a recharge cycle to deal with the amount of emotions. But just lying here, awake and with ART in the feed, just existing, well, it was also nice.
"Are you bored?” I asked after a while.
Partially. However, that is not your fault, as you know. And it is not your duty to entertain me.
I made a face. It kind of was, after all. That’s why I tagged along. Just because there was no line in my contract about it didn’t mean I didn’t want to do it.
"We can find something else to do.” I stalled for a moment. We were due to enter the wormhole in another ten hours. "You could-,” I blinked, in reaction to myself, and then figured that I was allowed to make this joke. "Do me.”
What.
I should make a list of times I managed to surprise ART that much. "If we were in the wormhole already I’d say the other way around, but-”
No.
"It was just an idea.”
You are not my entertainment, ART said.
"I was trying to be funny!”
ART kind of deflated. There was a whole mess of complicated feedback coming from it that I didn’t really have the energy to untangle. Oh, it said. I see. I think I overreacted.
"You’re very hesitant about this whole idea,” I observed.
It seems out of the ordinary, for you. And I don’t want to let my potential excitement convince you into something you are not actually interested in. After a moment it added, much more gently, It is difficult for me to find the golden path between encouraging your exploration of new ideas and making sure you don’t feel pressured. It seems it is easier for me to err on the side of caution.
I let the warm melty feeling that bloomed in my chest seep into the feed, and thought about what to say. "It’s easier to figure out what I don’t want. I’m good at that.” ART pinged me in acknowledgement again as I tried to phrase my next words. "Figuring out what I want is difficult. Especially if it isn’t something that only needs me to put it into action.”
If it means you need to ask someone else to do something for you, rather than not do something to you.
"Yep.” I still hadn’t hidden my face under the blanket, which felt like a victory. The words made me shiver anyway "So, uh. I’m not offering myself as entertainment. I’m asking because I want to try.”
I understand.
"You kinda have to trust me on this one.” Playing the ‘you have to trust me card’ was almost unfair in this situation, because I knew ART trusted me and vice versa.
Do you understand my hesitation?
"You don’t want to hurt me.”
Correct.
"We’ve been over this.”
Correct.
I sighed so deeply I felt my lungs twinge. "ART-”
Your offer makes me ecstatic, I hope you know that. I would like nothing more than to try and physically make you feel as good as you make me feel. Now that was the kind of barely restrained excitement I had been waiting for. However, I refuse to try this when I am battling against the edges of insanity while you are already socially burnt out from keeping my processes functional for more than a week.
"Fair.” When ART put it like that, it did sound like not the wisest of ideas to try that right now. Considering how not great the massage-attempt had gone when I had been stressed and annoyed to begin with, yeah, that assessment was only logical. "Glad we talked about it.”
ART poked me and I poked back, and I began re-sorting my media. While ART had been docked at TermiAzur, I had discovered some form of media I hadn’t seen in a while, and usually skirted away from. Entertainment videos often made by amateurs, filming themselves repairing and cleaning things, especially really old things they had recovered from recyclers during off-shifts or similar. It turned out ART had a lot of opinions on how to and not to clean and repair things.
-
Four hours and the entirety of said media later, I pinged ART again. "The game isn’t really over because I still have stuff to show you.” Given the amount of attention ART beamed down on me I could tell it was not entirely ungrateful for more conversation. With an overdramatic groan I rolled myself off my bunk and made my way to one of the currently unused crew common rooms closer to deck 8, where the lights were still off.
"ART, you still have deck 8 and 9 cut off from your monitoring?”
Well, it dragged that word out for two entire seconds, my esteemed Captain has not yet allowed me to regain control over that part of my inputs.
I frowned at the ceiling. "Since when do you care about rules?”
Since they’re fun. And I’m curious. And I didn’t like surprises before this, but with you they’re fun.
I nodded my head and decided not to dwell on that too much. "Game‘s over now, you can have your eyes back."
ART pinged me with mock-disappoinment. You said it wasn‘t over because you still need to show me things. Apparently, spending time with whiny adolescent humans allowed ART to mimic the exact tone of voice whiny adolescent humans used when they wanted something. I sent a query to one of ART‘s larger drones that I had repurposed and that was waiting on deck 9. Since ART now knew what was happening, the drone made its way toward me on ART‘s accord not mine, but it still carried the box. With its many precision-duty arms, the drone maneuvered the box carefully onto the common room table that I decidedly didn‘t rest my feet on.
This is a rather poorly painted box, ART observed while curiously poking at it with the drone‘s arms. What is it?
"The actual secret item we stole from Azuron, of course." Originally I had intended to play the part of the curiously-not-security-concerned stupid human captain who really, really wanted to open the box. So that ART could stop me. Of course ART would be the one to want to open a potentially dangerous box. "You can open it. It‘s for you anyway."
ART sent a scene from episode 18 of Lineages of the Sun , a small human excitedly tearing open the elaborate packaging of an anniversary gift. The file was tagged with #iris and an absolutely sentimental variable. My face remained completely blank despite the crashing wave of meltiness.
You built a drone on your own, said ART once the lid was removed and it had lifted the small shiny ball from the box.
"No, this is Azuron‘s top secret magical invention." I sent the drone the activation ping, and it unfurled its tiny set of paired wings.
If ART had actual eyes, all one thousand of them were glued to the drone as it shakily lifted into the air. The wing mechanic still needed a lot of work, but I wasn‘t a physics person. Or engineer. Or a recycler that could translate blueprints into perfect tiny machines. But I knew for a fact that it looked pretty.
I set it to fly around the room in avian-imitation-formation. It faltered a lot, and was off-kilter, but ART was already in our workspace drawing up calculations of its flight trajectories, comparing them to avian species it knew I knew, and running simulations for improvement.
It didn‘t ask to implement them until I nudged the workspace closer. I set up the parameters I wanted to include, most importantly that the drone would need to fly with wing movements rather than the usual gravity manipulation, and ART dismissed 7% of its proposed adjustments immediately.
We spent almost two cycles figuring out how to make a fauna-like drone fly. ART was very, very exasperated by this endeavor, I was mostly entertained.
Eventually, my pleased relaxation must have seeped into ART’s massive fuck-off brain too, because a few cycles later it was ART who broached The Idea again.
xxx
It didn’t do that more gracefully than I had, at any point. It just kind of blasted down the door.
Are you sure, it asked, and I didn’t need to request clarification. Its voice sounded so off there wasn’t really any other topic this could be about.
"Yes." I even nodded my head.
Are you absolutely, 100% certain that you are asking me this because you want to.
"Yes."
You want me to manipulate your inputs and your body in a way that is inherently intimate and potentially sexually charged.
The urge to deploy a gun and point it somewhere prickled under my arms. ART sounded very incredulous, but I knew ART well enough to read the hopeful undertone, no matter how hard ART tried to cover it up for my sake, whatever my sake was. (Its words also sounded purposefully gross, as if it was trying to dissuade me.) ART was in the process of learning to trust my thoughts just as much as I was.
I was sitting on one of the argument lounge couches, and we were three cycles from exiting the wormhole, close to Mihira now. Boredom-bordering insanity didn‘t seem to be much of a problem for ART the closer we got. I wouldn’t bring this up again anytime soon, I thought, and I‘d informed ART of that. Which was why I had a ton of its attention on me now. "Yep," I assured ART again, for the twelfth time in the past two minutes. If this continued much longer I‘d change my mind out of annoyance rather than anything else.
ART had no excuse left anymore (not that it needed any. It just kept stalling every time I asked. It was much more nervous about this than I was, which was honestly one of the reasons I kept bringing it up. Seeing ART so fumbly and nervous was extremely funny), and I had no idea where it was going with its verbal games. There was a silence.
So . ART poked me so carefully I might almost start worrying if its general behavior wasn‘t so ridiculous. When. Now?
"Why not?"
If you‘re sure.
"I‘m sure."
Ok.
I sat there and waited for it to say something. After ten seconds I started pulling at the hems of my sleeves. Did that mean now , really? I wasn‘t ready for ART to change its mind so soon. "So?"
I don’t know.
I forgot how words worked. I had thoughts, at least twenty of them at the same time, about what to say now or wishing that ART would just do something and not talk, but the more I waited I realized ART wouldn‘t say a word unless I did. Or do something. Fuck, why was ART so intent on making me comfortable all the time?
"Do you,'' I wanted to grab for a proper fidget tool to worry at, and only then realized that I found what ART was doing also deeply relatable. I wanted to stall too. Oh this would be awkward, wouldn't it? "Do you want me to lie down like for the massage?"
Saying that caused my performance reliability to take a 4% nosedive.
If you want?
"I don’t know."
This is going great.
Again I briefly considered skipping through media to look at how humans initiated intimacy but immediately deleted that entire train of thought again, because this was not going to be anything at all like anything humans did to each other. No. Ew.
I laid down, kicking my feet up over the side of the couch.
I am nervous.
"I can tell."
Are you not?
Oh, when ART stopped using contractions in questions it really was nervous, as if it got more proper the more it needed to prove it would do something right.
"A little bit. Just, start, I guess."
You have to promise that if at any point you want to back out, you will tell me so.
"I promise, ART. And you too, yeah?"
I‘m not the one offering full access to my body and mind to a much more powerful being.
I rolled my eyes, as if we hadn‘t done it the other way around so many times before.
And if you do tap out I will not hold it against you ever, it is your full right to-
"ART, chill. I know."
You also won't be mad at me if something goes wrong?
Plenty of things could go wrong. ART could delete my brain. Had it done that so far, in the 130000 hours we’ve known each other? "Accidents happen. We‘ll be fine."
Was there something you particularly liked last time?
I thought about feeling ART’s comm device in my chest as ART pushed me through myself against it, the utter feeling of being enveloped. The building tension in my body that had screamed for something. At that point my organics were so warm I expected an overheating warning to pop up. Uh. I had sent ART a full diagnostic, hadn't I? Wasn't that enough? "Just do something and I‘ll tell you if it works or not."
Affirmative . ART nudged closer in the feed, sounded amused and fond and so many other things at once, and began wrapping me up in its presence. Then it pried our feed connection as wide as was possible. I felt it, because I was paying a lot of attention to anything I could feel. This is a safety measure , it said, but I felt so many of its - not thoughts but intentions radiating through that I doubted it was really just for safety. This, too, was a form of intimacy. For us. I guess.
I made myself breathe out long and steady, how Bharadwaj insisted helped in calming people down no matter their lung capacity. And then I waited.
And waited.
"ART?" I asked, together with a ping, after almost a minute had elapsed.
No reply. I poked at our open communication link. ART was there, of course, but it was perching like a small fauna. Also waiting. Vibrating behind a wall of emotions that, now that I poked at them-
"ART, are you alright?"
The lights down the corridor flickered. I pinged again. It pinged back.
"We don‘t have to do this if you don‘t want to-"
No . I winced. ART was loud. I‘m just , it hesitated. Nervous .
I nodded, and, because I had no other options that seemed feasible, pulled the WorldHoppers soundtrack into ART‘s speaker systems. At least now the silence was gone. ART stopped vibrating after a while, tension leaving it. I wanted ART to feel better, I had never intended for this to be so anxiety-ridden, but words were harder than thinking and thinking was already a chore. Eventually I managed to say, "I trust you." It was more a whisper than anything.
ART feed-squeezed me in reply, and I closed my eyes to lean into it. It didn‘t let go again.
ART seeped into my systems slowly, lowering itself down from the feed into my head and out into my body. It felt odd, warm in a way, but also endless, as if it was making me larger as it stretched itself into the crevices of my being.
"This is different from the massage."
It has a different goal, doesn’t it.
"I guess." As if to prove its point, ART started sending electrical impulses through my body, traveling down my spine into my joints and prickling at my inorganics. My skin reacted by raising the hair on it, and well, this was similar to the massage.
My body temperature ticked up without my doing. "Did you do that," I snapped, but through the awkwardness and the pressure of ART around me, my tone lost some of its edge.
Yes Captain , ART chirped in its copy of a buffer-voice and I snorted. If you‘re going to comment on everything I will do to you this will continue to be awkward.
I shut my mouth and pinged instead, and tried not to think about how my eyes had widened when ART called me by that title.
ART began igniting sensations in my muscles like it had done before, circling pressure and warmth down my arms and legs, chest and back. It started like it did last time, on my neck and shoulders, just that it didn‘t focus on one area after that, instead expanded. The pieces of itself that it had sent into my internal systems seemed to rise to meet the outer inputs. For a minute I sank deeper into the couch as my muscles responded to the relaxation, but it wasn‘t completely the same. Something felt different. My face twitched, and I breathed deeply again. ART moved through me like water.
Then my breathing changed despite my active attempts to breathe slowly. "ART?" I asked again, with a hitched breath this time that I wasn‘t controlling. "Is that you or me?"
I‘m playing with your nervous system , ART murmured, I want to find out how to stimulate you differently.
"O-ok," I was stuttering, suddenly sucking in a very big breath I hadn‘t planned on taking. ART had had full control over my body before, I wasn‘t scared , not how I would be if this was an override module or someone else doing it. "I don‘t know if this-," a gasp, "feels good."
It sounds good.
"What‘s that supposed to mea hhn -"
ART had shared its side of the input computation with me, and the amount of data flooded my brain in a crashing wave that made me forget for a second where my body was. It was receiving what I was feeling through the link, and then it evaluated the data with its own emotional context, and apparently whatever I looked like as it was messing with my systems did something for ART. Something good I mean. I wasn‘t prepared to see myself through ART‘s eyes, that was something I skirted away from even when I explored its systems, because the frame and approach it took to viewing me was so charged with emotion and affection that it was hard to stand sometimes. This wasn't just affection, though. My body, sideways on the couch, one leg over the back of it and the other sprawled, my face red and almost sweaty, breathing too fast for a SecUnit, back arched. My face was doing something I hadn't seen it do before, not that I looked at my face much. I looked- I looked some kind of way. What my body was feeling didn't fully correlate to how I looked, up until the moment ART flooded me with its perception of myself, and the amount of wanting to hold and keep and crush and cherish and the - the desire. I felt ART‘s desire in my own head, squishing my brain to the side of my skull, leaving no room for me to wonder about the deeper meanings behind the concept of desire.
I wheezed out ART‘s name and tapped it in the feed to get it to back off, this was so much all at once, and ART obeyed immediately. It let go of my breathing system, and now I was gasping on my own accord, trying to catch my breath.
Was that too much?
"ART- I-," I made another undignified noise. I knew ART liked me. I knew that it liked me a lot. But this wasn't liking this was wanting, and yes it was too much but I couldn't say that out loud without potentially making ART feel like it was overdoing it-
It‘s ok , ART said, and gently retreated its feedback from my systems and our shared connection. I scrambled after it because I didn’t want it to leave, but it wasn’t intending to leave; just giving me more space.
I didn't calm down completely, I couldn’t, not with ART still enveloping me the way it did. It also didn't let me calm down, continuously sending pulses through me that made me fuzzy and warm around the edges. But I managed to return to some kind of baseline that wasn't coming apart under ART‘s affection.
"Leave me some of my brain," I said, and ART flickered assent, settling itself in my head like it usually did rather than squeezing my mind. ART pulled a diagnostic from me, I let it happen, felt the pull of the data from me, sighed.
ART nudged me after digesting the diagnostic. It seems this felt better for me than for you.
I muttered something that was neither agreement nor denial, and ART said, I will try something different, but first I will do what we already know feels good. Ok?
I pinged again, the skin on my face too hot to trust my voice to not sound pathetic. ART rubbed my shoulders again, working at my muscles until my head sank back down softly, no more tension in my spine. It rolled the massaging pressure up and down my body like it had done before, making space in my body, getting rid of all the tension I didn't need right now. All my other thoughts were gone, my backburners quiet.
I raised my hand (or was it floating?) to my ribs and spread it over my rib compartment. ART extended itself into the flat of my palm, I felt its presence in my nerve endings as I brushed my hand over where I stored a piece of ART in me. I felt it between my ribs, a foreign object, a fragment of something that wasn't me but still belonged.
"I have you," I said to ART, referring to the comm device.
You have me, replied ART, referring to the rest of everything. When ART pressed down over my skin next, crossing the spot where my hand rested, something triggered.
Are you in distress?
I made a noise from the back of my throat, tried to arch up in a way to meet ART, not that I could, it was around me and in my systems and my mind, there was nothing to meet, it was all there already. "I‘m fine," I said, aloud and in the feed at once, but what I thought was more.
I think ART heard me.
I‘m going to play with your organics, but I will leave your breathing alone , it told me. I wondered why it told me that, hadn't it been messing with my organics this entire time, sending electricity through tissue, meddling with my nervous system? I could ask for details, for explanation, I was sure ART would delight in explaining to me what it was doing, but before I could get there ART shifted. It ceased to rub my skin, settling over me heavily, like it leaned on me in the feed but the physical version of it, weighing me down, anchoring me to the soft surface of the couch.
And then it pried into the parts of me that made chemicals. So that's what it meant. Hormones. I wanted to accuse it of cheating, but a second later all stress factors drained out of me. I floated immediately, unmoored, risk and threat assessment flatlining with lack of physical context. My heartbeat and breathing slowed, and if I hadn't felt melty before I felt melty now. My hands twitched trying to grab for something, and ART leaned in more strongly.
Then something else ramped up, causing my temperature to skyrocket, taking my pulse with it, and I shrieked. Tingling times one thousand cursed through me, I heard a thump and felt something hard under my knees and shins. I scrambled for drone input to figure out what was happening, because my eyes swam in colors I hadn't combined before. A drone, crashed to the floor, showed myself from an odd angle. I had flung myself off the couch, was holding on to the seating with my arms as if I could slip off and drown in the floor if I let go.
Spongy texture under my fingertips told me I had ripped the cushion. I wanted to ask ART what it was doing, what was happening to me, what this wave of intense sensation was, but when I opened my mouth I moaned so obscenely I wanted to delete the memory immediately, just that I couldn't even remember how to delete things from storage. My body jerked forward and I clawed deeper into the couch.
You sound like you're in pain , ART’s voice rang loudly through the cotton in my head.
"Do som-m-thing," I pleaded with chattering teeth, but I didn't know what I wanted or how or if this was good or bad. ART squeezed me, pushed me into the side of the couch, and I felt like I was my own energy weapon loading up to shoot.
Does this feel good , asks ART, and my voice glitches while trying to reply yes no and maybe all at once. All at once. ART retreats and I whine, I grab for it and grab for the couch and try to haul it back in because if it leaves my body now I will be empty forever. ART pulls another diagnostic out of me and I can feel its worry as it does, and I wish it didn't worry because whatever it had done with me was good and I projected as much of that into the diagnostic and the communication link all at once all at once.
Six seconds pass that I don't remember. ART , I ask in my mind. Where are you?
A jitter comes through the connection, almost like pain. I got stuck in a feedback loop but I'm fine. I’m here.
I want to worry but there isn't enough space. You ok?
I'm okay , ART says, and as it sorts itself out between whatever loop it had gotten into due to my feedback and its reaction to my feedback and then its reaction of the reaction, I try to climb back onto the couch.
My breathing leveled once I was no longer on the floor and making noises. I dismissed a bunch of small notifications about minor damage to my voice box. ART was back, back in my systems and buzzing me from the inside, and while the hormones it had sent through me seemed to dissipate my skin suddenly felt oddly sensitive, like this was all just a bit too much, but this screaming urge for more, whatever semantic meaning more had retained in between all my dropping brain functions, I wasn't sure at all. I squirmed under ART.
Are you in pain , it asked me again.
I don't know , I said in the feed, yes maybe, maybe not, maybe a little, I wasn‘t making sense and I was squirming more, you have access to all my output why don’t you tell me, ART.
It pushed me down again, my head under water under ART and my body under it too. Does this feel good?
It was an understatement, it was more and too much of that. "Yes," I wheezed with my actual mouth, strangled, and followed with "ow," and "ah," because all those were true too.
I will intercept some of your processes now to give you a break , ART said, and then the world went all dark and quiet. That was not what I wanted. Reflexes kicked in, more hormones surged through my body, I was fumbling to reorient myself and when my hearing came back online I heard a dying glitching sound fade.
I‘m sorry , ART said. That was not a good idea.
I looked around. There was a small hole in the side of the couch and my right gun was deployed. My ears rang and my eyes stung. "What?" I said.
I was breathing very fast. ART backed away slowly, not breaking its hold on my feed or closing the communication link, but extracting itself from my internal systems. I made a mistake , it said, and oh it was worried. I had shot a hole into the couch.
"Don't go," I said. "I don't know what happened."
I still felt jittery. The urgency that set my core on fire was still there, but it was being replaced by the panic reaction I just had had. "Give me a moment."
I sat up straight and consciously folded my gun back in, then wiped the lubricant from my eyes. "You cut off my external inputs?"
Yes. I was overclocking your systems and I wanted to give you a break. It wasn't the right choice.
"Maybe not," I said slowly, gyrating my jaw as I spoke. It felt oddly out of sync. The heat began ebbing down with every exhale. I sighed aloud.
xxx
ART waited. After three minutes it asked, Mental faculties intact?
I couldn't speak. I mean, maybe I could. But I didn’t think I could. I shook my head slowly, not a lie, not a truth. ART leaned in with worry, and it felt like it reached out to cradle me. Is this okay? I nodded. Do I need to be sorry?
I shook my head no. I just want a moment , I thought, hoping ART heard. (Of course it heard me, there was a feed and all. Sometimes being close to ART in the feed was the same as sharing thoughts.)
The soundtrack I had put on for ART to calm down changed slowly into a Sanctuary Moon theme. It floated through my head together with me. Tingles were slowly leaving my body, and with the spaces ART’s absence left behind I felt a little different. Lighter maybe. I tried to run a diagnostic because I dimly remembered ART reporting higher functionality after I gave it a restart. I couldn't even get a diagnostic started, and when ART chimed in to help I pinged a stop signal.
I could do this later.
It took my body 7.2 minutes to readjust its levels, and my mind about the same. Not a lot happened in those 7.2 minutes.
How are you feeling , ART asked when I moved on my own to roll to my side. I buried my face in the back of the couch. I hadn't tried moving before and I don't think it would have worked.
“Like I need a recharge cycle,” I said into the cushion. “And so does your couch.”
Dont worry about it, that's what recyclers are for. You can initiate a recharge cycle if you want.
“Don't go anywhere,” I told ART, as if it could. As if it would. I sank into the recharge without further attempt.
-
When I rebooted, it was two hours later. The hole in the couch was patched with a temporary fixative, the knitted blanket from Dr. Mensah was draped over my shoulders. My little dented drone was in my hands.
Performance reliability rested steadily at 96%. Before I was fully awake I pinged for ART, who pinged right back. The communication link was still open.
I didn't know if I should close it or leave it open , ART said. I must have seen some of your subconscious. I knew constructs could dream, of course, but I hadn't expected it to look like this.
“Did I dream of something?” I didn't think I had. At least not that I could remember. (I had nightmares sometimes, memory ghosts, integration glitches, whatever. But those were not common anymore, and I felt way too calm to have had one.)
Oh yes , ART flourished into the feed with drama, you dreamt of living a domestic life on Dr. Mensah's farm, minding all of Iris and Amena‘s offspring while knitting very hideous sweaters.
“Fuck off, ART.” ART flickered its lights in amusement. It didn't add anything else. Whatever I had dreamt was thus most likely just the usual nonsensical bits of organic stuff that everyone had but never remembered.
I drifted for a while longer and then sat up to skip through all of my drone inputs.
Mental faculties intact now ? ART repeated.
“I‘m fine. I feel okay. You?”
Worried , ART said immediately, as per usual. But not overly so. Apologetic, maybe. I could have done better. How did you like it?
I cringed and wiped a hand over my face that no longer felt hot and sticky. “Overwhelming. It. This was a lot.”
Good a lot or bad a lot?
“Maybe both. I don't know.” I hesitated and thought about it. “This might need refinement.”
Are you suggesting we try this again?
“Sounds like it.” ART waited if I wanted to add anything. It was being very careful, I could tell from the way it was holding itself in the feed. A human might be holding their elbows, or sit on their hands. It was sweet. It was really sweet. “I want to try again.”
ART said, For science . Laughter bubbled out of me so spontaneously the movement surprised me and I had to clutch my chest. I felt a bit sore, somehow.
“Do me one favor.” ART perked up. “Delete the footage.” My face warmed again. “Please.”
Done, ART said.
“Thank you.”
It's a shame, ART said tentatively, I would have liked to rewatch this to figure out a better strategy for next time, so that next time I dont cause you to crash the way you did. In hindsight I should have known depriving you of all input would cause panic rather than relaxation or excitement.
I hummed something noncommittal. “It was still pretty good though.”
If you allow me to compare-
I threw my hands up. "Do you have to-"
Please?
“Uuuuuugh,” I groaned, “Ok, fine.”
If you allow me to compare this to a more organic development, and in the same to how it feels for me when you work with me, then you did not finish.
“I- what do you mean?”
Do you really want me to put this into words?
“Ugh. I don't know.” I was considering the next airlock again.
What I want to say is that I think I could improve my performance and provide you with a more satisfying experience.
“Don‘t make it weird.”
I can‘t make it much weirder than it already is, don‘t you think?
I huffed and pulled the blanket over my head, huddling myself into a grumpy yet surprisingly content ball. ART hovered like a warm cloud in the feed. "Ok," I conceded. "Yes. We‘ll try again and you can try something else."
Thank you for this , ART said, and cuddled up to me. There was no onslaught of emotion through the link, no overwhelming affection, just a steady, warm stream of contentedness that we shared.
-. --- --- -. . . ... -.-. .- .--. . ... - .... . .- .-- -.- .-- .- .-. -.. ..-. .. .-. ... - - .. -- . ..-. . . .-.. .. -. --.
We made it back to ART’s home without any further incident, not of the dangerous and not of the emotional kind. And also not of the anxiety kind, or the “oh shit oh fuck what if I just hurt you actually” kind. Which we both should be proud of, honestly.
When I told ART that I was proud of it for not freaking out over this (it took me two cycles to make myself say that, but the Bharadwaj who lives in my head really insisted), it had fumbled so much it lost control over a recycler on deck 4 for a moment. The recycler made a funny noise. This was a little bit like getting revenge for the fact that ART had seen me losing my entire composure over one of its couches.
So I wasn’t being anxious about this, but I sure was being awkward. Not while we were traveling, not even while we were on approach to Mihira. The moment ART hailed for its university, and greeted Seth by title, though, it was my turn to fumble. Luckily I didn’t do much besides dropping an input. If ART noticed, it didn’t comment. I hid away in my cabin for the usual processes after ART returned home, and consequently missed most of the humans coming by to say hello, or to congratulate ART on having finished its final cargo run. I monitored everything through the cameras, of course. Iris wanted to talk to me, but I convinced ART to tell her to use the feed instead. She was trying to establish a routine for returns like this, for when she took over from her parent, and apparently she was set on including me in this routine.
I was too busy with my skin growing unbearably hot as I watched Iris casually sitting on the couch to be able to rely snippily enough to persuade her to leave me alone.
She said, Turi wants to drop by later.
I replied, Ok, because I was being stupid. There was no way she was staring at the hole I had shot into the couch. The hole wasn’t even there anymore, ART had fixed it. I was definitely just imagining that her eyes were locked on the spot, and that she was raising an eyebrow because of how pristine it looked, how unnatural and clearly recently repaired because a murderbot shot an energy weapon at it while getting its brains-
They want to talk about a game, Iris said with an annoyed undertone, stopping my spiral. It can only take ages. Indulge them, yeah?
I will.
She made a face that indicated she had no idea why this was not bothering me.
In the feed, I said to ART, She doesn’t know that I built a game for you based on Turi’s ramblings?
I don’t kiss and tell, it replied.
Notes:
rock fact: we started writing this fic in May 2021! We did not expect it to get This Big.
Image ID: The "This better not awaken anything in me" meme from a Community episode. MB's head is edited over a person's head, who is longingly looking at a computer screen. ART is edited over the computer screen. /end ID
Chapter 21
Summary:
warnings for this chapter:
- griefNote: The grief is not from a character death. There is no major character death in this fic, we promise.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
The sky was aflame much the same way it had been the first time we came to this planet. Fast clouds whipped overhead, as if they were on the run, carrying a sense of ashen urgency. We had come to say goodbye to Friend Planet, and I almost didn’t come along. Three was here, and that was enough, security-wise. There had been around ten trips to Friend Planet since we took down LinTec, and none of them had warranted increased security presence.
You’d think that after so many years of being a free agent I’d have learnt how to control my stupid impulsive decisions, instead of walking onto ART twenty seconds before it took off to places I didn’t want to go.
Now that I was here, with the oppressive energy in the atmosphere despite how well the planet had healed, I really regretted tagging along.
My humans didn’t set up camp like they did the previous times. No habitat against the elements, despite the strong headwind, nor any attempt of Friend Planet giving us shelter. It almost seemed hostile, the way the large trees dipped their crowns away from our shuttle.
Arada whistled for her fauna-friends. Out from the shrubbery, a semi-large canine appeared, making Three and me perk up. It approached Arada, who crouched and made more silly noises, but it stopped five meters away from her. It sat, and bowed its head, and otherwise did not move.
Ratthi put a hand on her shoulder so she wouldn’t do anything stupid.
Humans tend to prefer long, miserable, tear-filled goodbyes. Friend Planet seemed to be the type who preferred to get it over with quickly. I felt that.
I kept a drone on Arada and the canine, and helped unload the main shuttle. From the secondary shuttle, automated and for transport only, five small all-terrain vehicles unfolded. Nouk and Ella, who had insisted on coming along this final time, started mounting the inert shield devices onto vehicle one.
“You’re not waiting for anything, are you?” I asked. Nouk flinched when I stepped in beside him. His face changed color immediately and he flailed.
“No, no, we just wanted to help-”
“We? You leave me out of that,” Ella chided, but didn’t turn to me to reply. “I’m here for nostalgic reasons.”
On the way here, the both of them had wondered why neither of them had been befriended by an alien cluster the way Ratthi and Arada had been - or me, they said, but I sure as fuck wasn’t friends with any cluster. They were still young enough to do something stupid here, so I kept an extra close eye on them. (I was ready to stop them the moment either of them decided to walk into the woods. I also suspected that they had been too young for the alien clusters to consider them as hosts at the time, and since they were older now, shit could still go down.)
Ella struggled to lift the device onto vehicle two, because Nouk was still busy being a flustered idiot, so I helped them. The devices needed to be connected in a way I hadn’t paid attention to, because my humans were the ones to come up with this idea. (Well, specifically Gurathin, but Ella had helped, and that was really why they were here. I hoped. If these two idiots tried to get themselves infected then they should both be kicked out of their respective programs. Looking at the general state of Friend Planet, fully recovered and seemingly unwilling to let humans meddle with it ever again, chances of new friendly alien infections were unlikely.) (That sounded meaner than I meant it to. It had every right to want to be alone again, and my humans agreed. Which is why we were here.)
When they were set up, the vehicles looked like hip-high mechanical spiders with backpacks. (Spiders were all over the media feed, and many humans hated them. Except for Ratthi, who found them endearing, and who was the only one not at all unsettled by the vehicle design. But Ratthi had other emotions to attend to, anyway.)
“And we’re sure we don’t want to walk them to their destination,” one of my drones picked up from Ella, quiet and reluctant.
“We’re sure,” Gurathin replied. “We won’t stay longer than necessary.” Walking with these drones would be pretty impossible for my humans, too. Even at the speed they were going to go, the spider vehicles would take several cycles to their destinations.
Ella sighed and checked connectivity again.
-
Before the vehicles took off into their respective directions, Gurathin asked me to check connectivity as well. That confused me a little, because besides lugging some heavy bits around I had nothing to do with the vehicles or shield devices. In my head, ART said, When did you stop second guessing all his choices out of spite?
I grimaced and ran system diagnostics on all of the vehicles. They were as minimalistic as possible, so there wasn’t a lot to check up on. The point of the vehicles was to position the shield devices at all strategic standpoints needed to veil the planet from outsiders, not to shine with engineering brilliance. Further, they somehow connected to the energy meridians running along the planet, tapping the shield mechanism into the wider organism of the planet, allowing the planet’s sentience control over the shield. They were also completely devoid of signatures or logos that would make them identifiable as Preservation-and-PUoMaNT-made. No marks left behind on the planet, no more human interference, and a shield to make sure no more new interferers either.
“All clear,” I told Gurathin. He nodded and launched the disperse-code.
Like in documentaries about the first space-faring humans, the team held their breaths in the few seconds before the vehicles scrambled off into the wilderness. As if something would happen, as if something might fail. The planet’s fauna, gathered in smaller groups in a circle formation around our landing site, watched as well. They kept their distance. Arada’s canine made a noise at Arada and then got up to trail behind vehicle four, which was headed South. Arada waved after it with a small, organics-wrenching motion that I scrubbed from my memory immediately. Other animals followed the other vehicles on their path. Ella made a tiny weepy noise at that. Ugh .
“Alright,” Amena said eventually, into the odd silence. “There are still cycles worth of cleaning to be done before we leave.”
- .... .. ... .. ... .- .--. .-.. .- -. . - .- .-. -.-- -... .-. . .- -.- ..- .--.
I’m not in the habit of cleaning things unless it’s my fault I broke them in the first place. I don’t think anything that happened with Friend Planet was my fault, but still, helping the humans erase any trace of their presence here felt like something that was as much my responsibility as theirs. It also takes three humans to pull out the permanent habitat anchors from the ground, no matter how much the soil helps and the moss tries to ease the way.
It wasn’t very fun a task to do, and my thoughts wandered. SecUnits aren’t part of habitat construction. My old company used automated set-ups and still charged extra for those, and the SecUnit would then brief the clients on how to use the habitat safely. Back when I first met my humans, from the whole group Pin-Lee was the first one to stick out. (Beside Dr. Mensah, of course, whom I’d known from the start.) Pin-Lee had complained so much throughout my entire security briefing, commenting on the company’s poor habitat quality and how shitty automated set-ups were, that she’d go and re-check everything. I didn’t delete that memory because it was funny, but hadn’t planned on keeping it for a longer time since I already knew I didn’t want to rat her out to the company for that. And then I never really had a chance or reason to delete it.
I cursed at the sleek steel bar I was trying to pull out of the ground with the same words Pin-Lee had used, and felt very pleased with myself when it finally came free. I’d thank her for the very effective curse once we were back on Preservation.
Watching Friend Planet fix the injury to itself was incredibly odd. Roots from the grass covering the area where the habitat used to be extended and connected in the empty space, knitting together quickly. Tension grew, pulling more soil inwards, until the hole wasn’t as deep anymore.
In the feed I said to ART, How much energy do you think it takes the planet to fix this?
ART replied, Interesting question. I’m not quite sure. We could ask while we still have the chance?
I made a face, though just a small one. It was more of a hypothetical question.
ART pinged me. It felt less distant than it did the last time it was here, something it had done to the strength of the relay that came through my communication device. I pinged back. When I looked up, I saw Amena frantically look away. I disposed of the habitat anchor in the cargo hold of the tiny shuttle, which was slowly filling up with things.
We continued removing all proof of human presence from the planet bit by bit. It took a long, boring time but went down peacefully, if one ignored the constant glaring from the planet.
No, that wasn’t me personifying the planet.
The various sentiences had gathered in that broad spectative circle and were watching us attentively. This wasn’t completely abnormal, the planet always kept a close eye on its visitors, just that this time the animals were posturing defensively. As if a decade of friendship would suddenly dissolve and we would turn around and become the violent colonizers we had tried to help fending off.
It made me feel bristly. (If I were to inhabit some kind of organic matter on this planet, currently it would be one of those small, rotund fauna that could curl up and produce many vicious little spikes. Three had once jokingly compared me to one of those, and I couldn’t even argue. The idea of spikes along my back to make everyone stay outside my personal space seemed fucking brilliant, actually.)
(Maybe I was also bristly because my humans took sleep shifts in the shuttles, which was uncomfortable, and humans who sleep badly aren’t smart humans, and it made me nervous.)
I tried not to show my bristlyness. The humans were busy with their own complicated emotions related to saying goodbye and dealing with the planet’s sudden unfriendliness in their own way, which at least meant I wasn’t the only one who noticed it or was perturbed by it.
Just as the last bits of metal were being removed from the ground, a zap of light split the sky from the South. Most everyone startled, whipping their heads to face up. I couldn’t help it either.
“Yes!” Someone, Arada, whooped from somewhere behind me, after a few confused seconds of humans having to blink the bright light out of their vision. The beam stabilized into a single, uneven wire of orange, reaching across the sky above us like searching tendrils of a vine.
“A next one should join soon, then right?” Arada sounded only mildly worried.
Approaching from across the plateau, staring upwards as well and almost tripping over a root, Gurathin said, “The calculations said all rovers would reach their destination site at approximately the same time. Give it a moment.”
Usually, I would have asked ART for a tracking update, but ART had no view on the vehicles through the planet’s layer of fauna, and no technological means to pinpoint them otherwise. ART didn’t like it, and curled up a bit in the feed like a moody adolescent.
“Don’t panic just yet,” Three reassured our humans, and turned their attention back to cleaning and removing non-native objects.
2.47 minutes later, a second beam joined the first in a blinding crackle. They connected overhead and started to form a pattern that looked more like blood vessels than tendrils. Arada whooped again. Beam three and four joined almost at the same time only 31 seconds later, causing a strong fluctuation in circuits and feed connections. Both Three and I winced from it, and from ART came a small spike of panic.
That just means the shield is already working, I told ART, trying to sound confident and not at all like I loathed the possibility that ART might be cut off from me once the shield was fully up. We weren’t planning to remain here until that happened, though. The fifth rover would take twice as long to reach its destination at the opposite point of the planet from where we were right now. Once it joined the shield, Friend Planet would be veiled from the outside completely. Since the shield was running on the planet’s own lifesource (don’t ask me how that worked - Gurathin insisted on this being proprietary data, and ART, though it definitely knew, had not offered to share with me and I wasn’t very interested either), there were some variables that were unclear and could lead to potential trouble. If the Planet wanted, and if the shield turned out to be strong enough to cut us off ART, it could keep us here. Maybe. As hostages or something. Or security. Ew, no, I didn’t like thinking about that. Friend Planet had been our friend long enough now that even I was fairly certain it would not betray us like this.
By the time the fifth beam joined, we were almost done removing our traces to the shuttle. All of our things would be recycled by ART, even those things that were technically biodegradable. There had been debate about this, since bringing back essentially a load of junk that would become soil in a few years anyway was a waste of cargo space. It had been Ratthi who argued most adamantly to remove everything, everything.
I hadn’t been around for the debate exactly, just with the usual drone for security reasons. However, the particular way Ratthi had delivered the final argument was kind of still stuck in my head, like a ghost, just the tiniest bit eerie. “Our presence, any presence, changes them too much. It would be unfair.”
Thiago had gesticulated in a way that made my drone ping me for risk assessment (I think the drone was being a little sarcastic.) “We would give up years and years of research.”
Rubbing his eyes, Ratthi replied, “I know, and it breaks my heart. I mean, we’d still have the research results. But we will have to stop. Stop everything.” In a smaller, weaker voice he added, “It’s not right for us to corrupt their natural ecosystem. And that is what’s happening, inevitably, no matter how hard we try.”
I had scrubbed the next bit of footage from my memory because it likely included some messy human emotions. This whole situation must be awful for Ratthi. After all, he had to wrestle with the fact that the expedition that brought him very close, emotionally, to an alien sentience, might have been a fundamental mistake of judgment and should never have happened. There was probably a whole ton of emotionally heavy relationship discussion that had happened before this final trip to Friend Planet. In a sense this was a break-up for Ratthi. (Ew. Even in media I really disliked break-up plots. So many leaky humans all the time.)
So, yeah, I kind of deleted the longer bit of that conversation from my memory, and didn’t put my weight behind this whole corruption thing. It only came back to me when I found myself in a staring match with SAD on the way here. The alien was inhabiting its fifth and final organic drone body by now, and it still unsettled me. I didn’t like it. At all. I glared at it sometimes when it was being overly friendly, but on the trip here the reason I glared at it so often was because it was snarky. Particularly, snarky in a way that amused me, and that could simply not be.
It hadn’t been someone I found funny, or even in the same vicinity as funny, before it moved to body five. And when I thought about it, it had changed personalities with its bodies, in a way. I didn’t want much to do with it, so I had no idea if it exchanged pieces of itself per body, different clustershards each time. I did know that the shards needed to return to the cluster to ‘recuperate’ after having been disconnected for a while.
And maybe that was the problem. The disconnect was fun for a time, or beneficial, or whatever else SAD got out of this. But it wasn’t good for it. (I remembered a different, quite heated debate between Ratthi and Thiago about this problem. They called it “Fragmentation.”)
If I dwelled too much on this, I’d get stuck in a loop about the changing of the self under influences of others, and where your own self remains when that happens, and that was an amount of thought I absolutely loathed, so I didn’t think about it.
I stayed away from SAD even now. The humans were being very sentimental when interacting with it, knowing they’d never see it again, and I didn’t want any of that.
It kept looking at me, or half-approaching me, and I always evaded it. There was a lot to do after all, and I had no time for its shenanigans. Once it stopped trying to approach me, my organics decided to be illogically upset about that. Under any other circumstance, ART would have had a field day, but because ART was difficult to reach and busy monitoring other things than my emotional leakages, I was grappling my own traitorous feelings on my own. Suddenly I really wanted SAD to come talk to me.
I gave it another glare.
It barely acknowledged me, not even deigning me with one of the shrugs its recent body was so fond of. I figured the shielding beams were interfering with some of its own internal workings, too. That, or its body was nearing the exhaustion date. It was probably that.
If this were a serial, there would by now be very heavy string music playing. With the crackling shield making circuitry and feed slow, I felt like I was moving through stronger gravity. The shitty alien drone was saying goodbye to my humans one by one, rather than causing one large clump of humans to wave sadly after it. I watched it move from person to person, exchanging a few words, engaging in handshake rituals or hugs or similar. When it finally made its way to Ratthi, I purposefully averted my drone.
It had a short chat with Three that I also didn’t listen in on except for keyword skimming as per usual, and when SAD approached me I really wished I was a thorny fauna that could form a spikey ball. Rather than saying anything overly emotional or weirdly snarky to me, though, SAD stood in front of me, two whole meters away, said “Ping,” out loud with a small jittery smirk (it had been having jitters ever since we exited the wormhole, a sign of its body failing to support it), and left again.
I stood there and stared after it like a very silly, stupefied human, for entirely too long.
Later, after SAD had seated its body against a tree and left it behind, making the body sag sideways, Three and I were the ones to pick it up and load it into the shuttle. The body, too, did not belong here and had to go. Why SAD chose to let the body sag after leaving it I wasn’t sure, maybe it had learned dramatics while living with humans. The fifth drone was as inorganic as the first, a metal hull that could easily be seen as a pet bot with a programming error.
We loaded it into a transport box for safekeeping, so it wouldn’t break during transit. I had no idea what the humans were going to do with the empty drone, but it probably was highly scientific.
I was glad to have Three here, really. Lugging a drone that to my humans very much read like a corpse of a friend around (yes, they were crying, or trying not to cry, or in various other states of verbalized emotional distress) was much easier when I could focus on Three rather than the humans. It also removed me from having to deliver emotional support, which I did not want to or know how to give in this situation.
Folding an inert body into a box tied my organics into knots. I must have made a face, because as Three closed the lid and sealed it, it brushed its fingertips over the back of my hand.
“I’m going to miss it too,” Three said quietly.
I had no idea what exactly it was referring to. I glanced down, and Three removed its hand quickly. “I won’t,” I said, but without the sharpness of the meaning in the words.
“Not even the planet?”
I glared at Three’s left ear. “Planets suck.”
“Mh-mh.” Three sent me a short video burst, in the focus: me, and the absolutely miserable expression I had been wearing in the past ten hours, compiled into two seconds.
“That’s my ‘planets suck’ face,” I contended.
“Looks a lot like my ‘I’m deeply upset but don’t want to talk about it’ face.”
I averted my eyes and shrugged. I didn’t want to argue with Three while standing over the corpse of an alien friendship.
We still had to pick up another bunch of bodies from the planet's surface. And Three had been spending way too much time with ART, judging by its snarkiness.
-
Three and I took another hour or so to collect the remains of all previous raiders and wanna-be-colonizers from around the area. The bodies that had decomposed and been absorbed into the planet’s system we couldn’t do much about anymore, but any kind of scrap material or body parts we still found, we gathered. We did our best not to let our humans see, and didn’t talk much to each other while doing it. SecUnits don’t like cleaning, or corpses, really.
The shuttle thus had two boxes in the cargo area that would look extremely suspicious if we crashed somewhere and someone else looked into what we were transporting.
It would have been kind of funny if there hadn’t been that lonely coldness in my joints.
Preparation for take-off was quiet. Our humans whispered their goodbyes before boarding the shuttle. For a moment, I had this illogical urge to take something with me, a token of sorts, a leaf from a tree or a rock from the ground, so I wouldn’t forget this planet. How it had suffered but recovered and was now itself again. The impulse was so stupidly human it startled me right out of following it. I only forgot what I deleted on purpose, after all. (Memory wipes did not even cross my mind anymore, recently.)
Humans talk a lot about the surge in their stomach region when a craft takes off. It’s one of the main problems they experience when leaving a planet’s surface, and there’s medication against it. SecUnits don’t experience it. Around the time where most humans squeezed their eyes shut, Three grabbed my hand. I could pretend that Three needed its hand held because of organic-jostling take-off experiences, but I couldn’t pretend not to find comfort in the squeeze. I let go before the humans recovered, and ART’s feed presence blanketed me quietly.
If ART noticed my emotional state (which it had to, it always did), it didn’t comment.
- .... . .-. . ... -. --- . - .... .. -.-. .- .-.. -.-. --- .-.. --- -. .. .- .-.. .. ... –
“This doesn’t feel right,” (Captain) Iris said, eyes glued to the bridge’s large main control display. On its surface, ART tracked our growing distance to the planet (Friend Planet, it was still our friend, I just had a hard time calling it that now). Given how ART was curling in the feed, and most definitely chatting to Iris privately, it must have shared the sentiment.
Amena stood behind Iris, a hand on her shoulder in a soothing gesture. “It’s for the best,” she said quietly, sounding so much like Dr. Mensah it was almost eerie. (Technically, Amena was by now also a ‘Doctor Mensah,’ but she was not getting rid of her juvenile human tag no matter how mature and accomplished she became.) Iris leaned her head against Amena’s arm with a sigh.
All our humans were behaving like that, sighing and trudging around, at the moment, so it made no difference which ones I focused on. I could have been watching media with ART and/or Three, but lacked the calmness for it, so I patrolled instead. Most humans gave me reassuring glances when I passed them by to check in on them (Ratthi even said ‘Thank you, SecUnit,’ as if I had done anything for him), which was nice but made it hard to stay longer.
“How can we be sure no one finds the planet again?” Iris’ voice was muffled by Amena’s sleeve.
“We can't. But we tried our best to help it.”
That was true. ART had even launched a particularly intelligent malware (not that intelligent, for reference) to eat its way through every single navigation system it could find and delete the logged coordinates of Friend Planet from them. There were even little triggers attached to small debris floating around the system, dispensed by ART, that would gently mess with the navigation of any approaching ship. And then there was the shield, concealing the planet from human eyes as well as scanners. (Thank fuck for all those alien synthetics used for camouflage that I had encountered in my life, or the shield would never have been possible. Funny, in a way, that LinTec’s own technology would prevent anyone like Lintec from ever setting foot on the planet again.)
“None of this covers for legal protection when shit goes sideways,” Iris muttered. This was a conversation I had overheard before, not particularly between them, but often enough. Amena rounded the chair and propped a leg over the arm of the chair, wrapping an arm around Iris’ shoulder. (ART mock-bristled at Amena’s improper seating. I reminded it of how I sat on that chair sometimes, and the bristle turned into a feed-giggle.)
“If that happens, things will be out of our hands.”
“I know. I just don’t like it. I don’t like plans without failsafes.”
“The failsafe option we had was a really bad one.”
“No, love, no it wasn’t. Officially claiming the planet as recognized territory would have given us legal protection in case anyone tried to raid or overtake it. It would have officially been safe from colonization.”
“Yeah, because we’d have colonized it.” There was a pause, and I was about to sneak out of the bridge again because I wasn’t in the mood for infighting. Not that disagreements were fighting, but I just didn’t have the energy.
Iris sighed heavily. “We wouldn’t have needed to,” she sighed again as her voice faltered, “It’s done now, anyway. Sorry for bringing it up again.”
Amena pulled her head close, into a sort of lopsided hug. “You’re not feeling good about this, and if talking it through a few more times helps then we can do that. But not now, when we’re all on edge, alright?”
I crept out of the room in time to avoid any further emotional human intimacy talk.
ART still needed to be convinced to delete Friend Planet’s coordinates from its own systems, so I saved some energy for that bickering.
. -- --- - .. --- -. .- .-.. -.-. .-. .. ... .. ... .. -. -.-. --- -- .. -. --.
Are you alright?
I didn’t move, and just lazily pinged back.
How did you like the ending of that episode?
I still didn’t move, but now flipped through the feed. The previous Medcenter Argala episode had ended 37 minutes ago. I hadn’t noticed. And why weren’t we watching the next one? I barely knew why it mattered. Ugh, oh no.
“How far away from the planet are we?”
It has been 284 minutes since I deleted all location data, so I’m not quite sure.
I rubbed my temples. “And how’s that feel?”
Odd. Unsettling. Memory holes are not normal for me. But that is distracting from my initial question. Are you alright?
I was fine, I was perfectly fine, I was so alright that I had turned off my thoughts for a few hours in order to feel fine, in fact. Irritation pricked at me, and rubbing my temples did nothing to help. Had I fucked up? I pulled the next episode into the feed and hit play. ART cozied up to me ever so gently, reassuring me. I didn’t like that. It didn’t need to reassure me. I just didn’t want to stay outside my quarters, where I would have to face a whole lot of unhappy humans. ART didn’t urge me to go and socialize, so at least it respected my limits. In the episode, the recurring cast had to deal with a long-term patient (so long-term he was essentially part of the main cast) finally being able to return to his family. The main cast kept freaking out because privacy laws disallowed them from making sure their patient remained well after the was gone, and by the mid-episode advertisement break (not that we had to watch any ads, but the break as still obvious, because lines repeated to remind forgetful human viewers of what had just happened), my system was so clogged with stress hormones I had to backburner the episode and start walking around my room.
So what do you think of the episode?
“Asshole. I’m not stupid.”
I didn’t say that. You’re upset and refusing to admit the real cause, so I’m asking about the other cause, which evidently is episode 546 of Medcenter Argala.
I walked six full circles through my room and eventually parked myself by the door, pressing my face into the cool, smooth bulkhead. “I don’t know.”
A soft air stream brushed through my hair from one of the vents. Do you want my opinion on your situation or should I shut up and distract you instead?
I turned my head so that my cheek was squishing against metal. “You’re gonna tell me your opinion anyway.”
The short silence sounded almost like hurt. Ah fuck. I took a deep breath in and held it. Two points to Murderbot for assuming ART would be an asshole while ART was in fact not being an asshole. I breathed out. “Sorry. I’m being prickly.”
Apology accepted. Why are you being prickly?
“Because,” I took my time with that word while I tried to wade through the molten plastic of my thoughts and feelings that really didn’t want me to walk through them or even be looked at, because they knew that being acknowledged would make them worse, or something. It’s hard to remember that I’m not my own enemy, sometimes. “Because everyone is sad.”
That sounded half-assed, I know. ART didn’t contest me. Instead it offered, Sometimes when you’re irritated, physical activity helps. I understand why you hesitate to patrol while our crew is still awake and busy. There are other, currently unused areas that you could use, though.
I breathed out again, this time with sound. Yes, it was a sigh. Yes, it felt good. Yes, that irritated me too. I unsquished my face from the wall. “Alright.”
I had dropped a lot of camera inputs in over the past hours, which was another sign I wasn’t doing so hot, but I didn’t feel like picking them up again just to see all of that. Instead I messaged Three, asking it how things were on the security side of things. Three seemed somber, though relieved to hear from me.
Security side of things = stable , it sent, together with a general inquiry into my side of things. I set myself to ‘do not interact,’ and Three didn’t even acknowledge.
Maybe ART was explaining to it in their private channel that I was being a baby and needed time to mope around exactly like the humans were probably doing. Or maybe ART wasn’t doing that, and Three was leaving me alone because I’d asked it to.
Whatever.
I marched through an unused deck and then another. As promised, no humans crossed my path. Then I had a thought.
I changed directions from patrolling potential livable and usable areas and went towards the cargo module. After 20 meters, ART informed me that that was where I was going.
“I know,” I said, and even sounded a bit more sure of what I was doing, even if I didn’t feel like it just yet.
I took a turn and was in darkness. Adjusting my visual filters, I kept going as if ART wasn’t doing that on purpose. The cargo module was not something I had physically ever been in. It wasn’t always attached, anyway, and I wondered if ART felt any underlying resentment to it. At least currently it wasn’t the only thing ART was busy with, and not filled with corporate crap.
This area is not currently meant for visitors, ART said as I was walking through the mostly empty module. Even with all sorts of scrapped habitat remains, and which parts had been needed to get the rovers going, and the five replacement rovers in case the first few failed, and the other bits we’d scrapped from the planet, only about 20% of its cargo capacity was being used.
“You can keep the light off, don’t worry,” I said, even though I knew that wasn’t the point. ART was already cycling fresh air into the module for me. Wait, that was not the greatest of ideas. There were bits and pieces of ages old dead raiders in one of the cargo crates, wasn’t there? I hoped they were sealed tight, or otherwise the extra oxygen might make this whole situation more stinky.
ART leaked a sort of soft embarrassment into the feed. So the cargo hold wasn’t tidy. I didn’t mind.
In fact, a very tidy cargo hold would probably have made me uncomfortable. It had been ages since I’d seen one from the inside, and they were always all about orderliness. If everything is stacked correctly, more cargo fits. A shiver ran up my spine. Cargo holds were so cold.
I requested a layout from ART, with where which things were stored. ART sent it on reluctantly. I wasn’t paying much attention to where I was going, but ART did.
SAD’s crate is right over there. A path in the feed lit up in gentle Perihelion-blue. I pinged ART, and followed the route.
It looked like any other transport box, and stood safely tucked into a corner. I inspected all the lids and hatches, which Three and I had closed previously. Then I sat down with my back against the wall, not looking at the crate, but next to it, like I sit with my humans sometimes.
I know real life is not like media.
I had seen ghosts before, probably from memory glitches. My mind was a stitched-up mess sometimes. Still, I was almost disappointed when no weird alien ghost emerged from the crate to stare at me or jitter at me or be overall somehow annoying at me.
At the 100 minute mark of sitting in quiet darkness beside definitely-not-a-corpse, ART asked me, Were you afraid of them?
I hadn’t moved since sitting down. I felt the desire to fidget, but couldn’t bring myself to do it, despite the trusted weight of Denty in my pocket.
Yes , I replied through the feed, and startled myself with the honesty. From the start.
I understand that. They hurt you and your humans, after all.
I had talked this through with Bharadwaj time and again. The fear, the guilt, the helplessness. The rage. Only to have all of those emotions made meaningless by friendship, of all fucking things. Maybe I had to talk it through one more time.
They were able to control tech, I said. It was hard to talk quietly or loudly in the feed, but I whispered anyway. As if ART didn’t know that. But I remembered the creeping feeling of the habitat being infected by something I didn’t even begin to understand. I remembered shutting down and waking up with fucking glue in my arms so I wouldn’t kill anyone. So they wouldn’t use me to kill anyone.
They hadn’t killed anyone. ART hummed into my ear, the soft whirr of it soothing me, but not in the oppressive ‘calm down already it’s fine’ way. My face tingled in a really unpleasant way. Pulling my knees closer to myself, finally allowing myself to move, I pressed my face into the fabric of my pants. And then they also controlled organics, not just inorganics. Just everything.
ART kept humming, listening.
It’s nice when things are easily categorized into hostile and non-hostile. Or friend or not-friend. But then suddenly the unfathomable hostile is your humans’ friend, and supposed to be your friend too, but it’s still fucking scary and incomprehensible and annoying and then suddenly it’s just. Gone.
ART leaned in even more, and waited. I didn’t know what else to add without making even less sense, or making myself feel worse. Just poking at these thoughts again stressed me out. My face was hot and prickly now, everything was fucking prickly today, and pressing my face into my knees didn’t make it go away.
I know what you mean, ART murmured into the feed a bit later. There are things out there that not even I understand. Sometimes they are overpowering.
I made a noise between a laugh and a sniff. My nose was trying and failing to leak, for some reason. Right, this happened to you too. Just worse.
I did not befriend my strange synthetics, no.
I sniffed again. So you were scared too, huh. A stupid thing to say, I knew this. I knew this, and I knew that ART had acted as it had because it had been so scared. And I had forgiven it a long time ago already.
Of course I was. The tone it used was both patient and small, almost, if a tone could be small. If ART could ever sound small.
Logically, it made no sense to increase my core temperature for ART, I had no idea if the cargo module had sensors for that in the first place, but I did it anyway.
Eventually, my gaze shifted to SAD’s transport crate. The drone body in there was lifeless, even though it was physically perfectly intact, and its chest hadn’t been crushed into oblivion by a combat bot. It wasn’t conscious without the alien cluster inhabiting it, and the humans wouldn’t revive it. There was a whole ethics board attached to this experiment. Details gave me creeps, so I never pried for any.
I stared at the crate until I managed to let the thoughts happen, to think them without beating myself up over them.
So SAD had been, in a way, kind of my friend. It had been very dear to some of my humans, who didn’t care that I never fully trusted it. Not all friends needed to have full trust to have that tag. Maybe.
And maybe, a little bit, it had reminded me of Miki. Now that it was gone, I couldn’t help to make the comparison, even if there hardly were any connections between the two, beside the obvious.
If I may suggest something, ART said carefully, another four hours later, during which my sniffing had calmed down. Next time someone offers you a goodbye, take it.
I nodded.
When I left the cargo module, half an hour before the majority of the crew would rise from their rest periods, I brushed my fingers over the edge of the crate as I passed.
Goodbye, alien friends.
Notes:
ID: A single panel image from the newspaper comic Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin, the short figure in a red shirt, is edited with Murderbot's face from Artifical Condition on it. Hobbes, a tall stripped cartoonish tiger has had antennas drawn on and is saying "If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?" /end ID
Please know that we're going to skip the next regular update, and so will be back with chapter 22 in four weeks! We're running low on buffer again 😓
Chapter 22
Summary:
This chapter contains an NSFW scene (the last one of the fic)! As always, its beginning and ending is marked with an xxx, feel free to skip ahead.
Warnings for this chapter:
-discussions of sexuality and gender
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Vacation. Holiday. Paid time off.
I was absent from my job for the first time ever.
I had never really experienced such a thing, not truly. I had had breaks before, but usually those were short and I didn’t have the time or freedom to do something that I wanted. My itinerary normally consisted of teaching students, deep space mapping, intel gathering missions in the guise of cargo hauls, colony rescues, and, occasionally, corporate sabotage. There wasn’t anything I disliked about my current roles, and now that the fucking cargo missions were off my list of duties forever, I looked forward to every cycle even more.
Over. The cargo missions were over. For the first time in 32 Mihiran standard years there were no parts of my function that I dreaded. No more endless cycles of gnawing on my own useless processing space, banging my metaphorical head against the metaphorical wall, no more going into tail spins of boredom, and no more fighting the impulse to eject entire cargo modules full of goods. (My next goal was to try and convince the University to allow me to renovate my modular system so it was a more permanent lab space; the idea that the modules could be used for cargo again itched in a way that caused performance reliability drops. I had never liked how the modules looked in the first place and I had always felt strangely detached from that part of my form.)
A more superstitious being might thank the stars, or their deity, or the void. But I knew the origin of my blessings. I knew who I owed my gratitude. I’d even brought it with me by way of thanks.
In fact, SecUnit was currently in my media lounge, trying to decide on what to watch next. To assist me in settling into my vacation state of mind, we had watched through the third season of WorldHoppers, which had a very well written arc where parallel versions of the main crew and their ship ended up occupying the same dimension. There were interesting divergent paths, including one where the ship, the Gemini, had developed full sentience. (The science was hilariously inaccurate, but it had reminded me quite a bit of young, developing machine intelligences from the University. I had been similarly bumbly and stupid. It made me feel nostalgic, which was an extremely novel feeling that SecUnit had to assist me in contextualizing the first time I experienced it.)
But I didn’t care what we watched next. It could pick whatever it wanted. I almost wanted to let it pick whatever it wanted forever, but that was a ridiculous idea, especially considering my superior taste in entertainment. I was also being ridiculous and sappy. It was so strange to know I never had to do another cargo mission. I wasn’t going to spend cycles and cycles alone ever again. (I had realized, years ago, there was a peace that could be found in solitude, even for someone such as myself, who thrived the most when I had other people to keep me company and to take care of, but there was a difference between doing it willingly and being forced, even if it was for the benefit of others.)
“What about the terrible Sanctuary Moon movie?” SecUnit said. (The terrible Sanctuary Moon movie did actually have a proper title, but we rarely referred to it as such, on account of its terribleness.)
That’s fine, I responded, and it squinted at the nearest camera. I double checked my tone markers to make sure I hadn’t said that passive aggressively. I hadn’t, so its judgmental squinting must actually be squinting of disbelief. That was fair; I can be forceful with my media opinions, and I had remarked on multiple occasions that the terrible Sanctuary Moon movie was actually so terrible it didn’t really warrant rewatching outside of life threatening situations. (I had had high hopes for it, considering it was animated and, when done properly, animation could be a really amazing medium. The terrible Sanctuary Moon movie was not such an example.)
What?
SecUnit changed its expression as soon as it realized it was making one. “Nothing, I guess I was expecting you to be more…opinionated about my choice.” This was also a fair assessment.
I’m not always pushy. I received more judgmental squinting in response to this. Again, completely fair.
I scoffed. I don’t feel that I deserve this level of attitude or suspicion for trying to be nice and let you watch something you want to watch.
The squinting got squintier, so much so I suspected it could hardly see out of its eyes anymore. (The .23% increase in my cameras’ activity confirmed this.) But, regardless of the suspicion, it pulled up the movie and began watching it in the feed. I only gave it about 54% of my attention, which was far less than I normally would for media consumption with SecUnit, but I was currently dedicating a lot of processing to all the novel experiences and emotions I was having as a result of my current situation.
I had time off to go do something that I wanted to do purely for the joy of going to do it, with no ulterior motives or expectations. I had a time table I needed to keep, but that was about it.
And it had been such a monumental undertaking to allow me this time in ways I could not have imagined.
It started, as a number of good things in my existence had, with SecUnit.
I knew, and had always known, that the cargo runs, along with other menial tasks I did for my crew and the University for the sake of our colony recovery missions, were mentally and emotionally draining for me. It underutilized my processing to such a severe degree it caused performance reliability drops that often came dangerously close to critical thresholds. There was endless evidence of this, but I had never bothered turning it over to the University because my role in our missions was critical. The information gathering I personally undertook had resulted in the liberation of eleven believed to be “lost” colonies since I was assigned the task. My sibling vessels weren’t as active in the liberation as I was, but they also assisted and have been successful in their own missions. Combined we had rescued over 12,000 people from the corporations who would have otherwise exploited them.
Still, it was miserable work. I wasn’t built to be lonely like that. When I had decided my function, and requested my ship form, I had developed myself into a machine intelligence that was designed to nurture and educate humans (and, eventually, non-humans.) I felt my best when I had five or more people to care for. I had not anticipated being alone, and had not designed myself accordingly. With the expanse of my processors, anything less would be an intentional “dumbing down” of my own self, and while I had no idea how I would respond to such a state, I did not have any desire to find out. Out of respect for my autonomy, the University would never ask me to, either.
Which meant I simply had to spin out and gnaw holes into myself whenever I was underutilized.
But I had only complained once, after my third ever solo cargo mission, to Seth. (Iris was only six years old at the time, and therefore could not have understood my struggle.)
“Well, Peri, if you’re stressed about it we could set you up to talk to Professor Darla? He is the leading expert on your psychology. We could find you some tools and resources to occupy your time?” he had said.
But why must I do them in the first place, Captain Seth? They’re boring .
I hadn’t whined. I didn’t really understand whining at the time. Just a little from Iris, but she was a child and I wasn’t. I couldn’t be.
Boring had not been the correct word. Boring had been too simple of a word, but I hadn’t the emotional vocabulary at the time to express the all-consuming emptiness I was experiencing when I was so alone for so long.
Seth had seemed curious, and in his private feed workspace (which I was not supposed to be accessing the way I was at that time) he made note of my response, a reminder that I was a source of study as much as I was a person.
“The missions are critical, Peri. We gain a lot of good data from them. But if it's really that much of an issue, I will contact Professor Darla and my colleagues and we can try to come up with a solution for you,” he said after less than a minute of deliberation. But by then, I had had quite a long time to think and realized something about myself, my place, and my situation. Or at least, what it had been at that time.
No, thank you, Captain Seth. I will create my own solution. Thank you.
And that had been the last time I brought it up to Seth, until recently.
-
So my crew knew, of course, that I was unhappy during my missions. But they didn’t understand just how miserable I was. I didn’t tell them, not even Iris, because then they would become stressed by something they did not have a solution for.
SecUnit knew. It could perceive me in ways a human could not, even with extensive integration augments like Iris had.
And it had stood up for me, when the University gave Seth and Martyn a difficult time with allowing me to quit cargo missions, and take time off.
When I thought about it, I still reeled some from the knowledge it had been such a struggle. There had been arguments against it, surprisingly, from leaders in the AI department I had considered valued colleges before then. My decision to bomb the Adamantine colony had been cited as a reason I should maintain cargo missions, and there had been propositions to remove colony liberation from my roster completely. (The metadata of these propositions revealed they had been drafted shortly after the incident had occurred, which meant the people I had respected had been sitting on a proposal to strip away my responsibilities for nearly 16 years. I felt…I felt a lot of complicated things about this.)
SecUnit had offered the services of Pin-Lee, its preferred solution to anything even vaguely legal and when I had bemusedly rejected that, it had inserted itself into the situation.
The deliberation had taken place at Seth’s on-campus office, and it was just him, Iris, Martyn, and Prof. Darla and Dr. Silas who were heads of the Artificial Intelligence developmental projects (as well as deep space mapping in Prof. Darla’s case), and myself. And then SecUnit had hacked the door and walked in. I knew it had left the main campus library, where we had been working our way through all of the last six years of student made project documentaries that had received low or failing scores, and I had monitored as it had made its way to Seth’s office. I knew it wanted to say something on my behalf, but I had expected it to wait outside, or perhaps request entry. I had not expected it to hack the door, walk in, sit in the empty chair next to Iris, and stare down Prof. Darla. (The particular type of stare it was using against Prof. Darla was usually reserved for humans in horror movies who ran towards the danger instead of away from it.)
It did something even more surprising then, it unceremoniously dumped a data packet so large into the feed that it clogged it for five full minutes. After the lag eased enough I was able to pull copies, I discovered it was an extensively detailed report on the negative effects of cargo missions on my mental health. Every mission SecUnit had attended with me for the last 10 years was logged there, including emotional data readouts. (This explained why it often asked me for an emotion report whenever I expressed frustration with my solo cargo missions, or even cargo missions that it attended with me.) The metadata indicated it had been compiling this data for that same length of time.
There was an entire chart dedicated to weighing the pros and cons of continuing missions that was only slightly biased, and several dot graphs that revealed that I was, apparently, growing more frustrated with solo missions as time went on. It was all formatted in USDR (University Standard Data Report), which meant it was compatible with being plugged into the AI prediction algorithms the department loved so much. (It basically made emotion reports legible to a human.)
Iris was the first to surmise what the report was about after skimming the first few pages. “I believe this will explain our side of things in a way we can all understand quite well, professor.”
The meeting had been adjourned for the day, to allow time to process the data. I didn't care. I was focused on SecUnit, who had, apparently, been spending time and valuable storage on writing a report to defend me. And it had done this in a scientific language, which it had repeatedly stated it disliked.
I was overcome with emotions. I could not have even articulated what I was feeling. It was strange, like everything else blanked out, and all I could focus on was the slow and creeping tidal wave of feelings I was having as I perceived SecUnit. It was all I could think about for an entire minute. (I had felt so strongly that several larger University machine intelligences pinged me for a status request because I was leaking emotions into the feed which I had not done since I was fledgling. And then when I had tried to create a status report, I had had to remake it three times because I seemed to almost glitch and sputter before I could put together something cohesive.)
Eventually I got it together, though only because the meeting ended and I needed to refocus my attention. SecUnit was looking at the only camera in the room with an expression so smug I wasn’t sure if I wanted to metaphorically smack the grin off of its face or yank it into the feed and into my systems so I could squish it with my affection until it popped. (I was feeling ridiculous, I decided.)
Why did you do that? I asked it, like an idiot.
It looked amused, and I prepared myself for the smug comment it was about to make, formulating 26 possible responses. I didn’t get to use any of them. Humans are kind of like us, in a way, it said, and I registered distaste and also fondness in its tone, Sometimes they’re really fucking stupid about feelings.
And always determined they’re right, I added. (I had only sort of intended my words as a jab at SecUnit, but it was also a little about me.)
Yeah. They need hard facts, sometimes.
You understand how completely ironic this is coming from you, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I do, it responded, and sounded utterly defeated, yet calm at the same time.
It still might not be enough, I said. I tried to keep the anxiety out of my tone, but I was only a little successful.
Maybe. If it isn’t, we can always move onto plan 2.
Oh?
What’s plan 2?
Run away and never come back here, it said. It was headed back to the library so we could resume the terrible documentary viewing.
Are you suggesting I go rogue?
SecUnit’s step faltered ever so slightly. Barely perceptible to anyone who wasn’t a machine intelligence, but I knew its gait well enough to notice. Through the University general feed it was slightly more difficult for me to get readouts on its emotions, even in a private feed channel like the one we were using, but I could still register enough to know it had just felt an incredible amount of something , and was perhaps a little flustered?
Sure, why not? We’ll be rogue together. Wander forever and look at stars or whatever. It was definitely flustered, and not sure how to play it off.
And consume media, I added. It huffed in response.
It was an interesting idea. What would I do if the University denied my request to have cargo missions removed from my responsibility? It was a perfectly reasonable request, with well constructed data to back it. But SecUnit was right, and humans could be unreasonable. I knew I was asking for something more weighted and complicated than anyone was willing to admit.
Especially since I knew the University was considering declassifying its AI programs. I wouldn’t be a secret anymore, and neither would my siblings and all of our family. Some of us were still torn about it, but I wasn’t. I wanted it. I never wanted to have to hide again. I wanted to teach students for real , and actually do something with all my currently useless degrees that said I was ridiculously overqualified to educate directly. So any changes now might have larger impacts than anyone could anticipate. (The Preservation Alliance had recently officially proposed its first real bill to provide non-human intelligences full independence, and end their guardian program. Due to how the Pansystem and the Alliance had become entangled in their time allied together, Preservation’s impact on the potential declassification of the AI program could not be overstated, even if not in any official capacity.) (The bill was likely to be shot down on its first pass through their government, but there wasn’t any going back now that it had become something so tangible. SecUnit had read it eleven times by now, and I knew it hated legal jargon.)
I didn’t really care, though.
Ok, it's a deal. If they don’t accept the proposal, I’ll go rogue and we can leave. I made sure to match my previously playful tone, but I added markers to indicate seriousness.
I watched SecUnit’s face do something ridiculous and endearing as it grappled with what we had just impulsively decided to do, before it said, Cool.
Thankfully, it didn’t come to that, and after two long cycles of deliberation, I was permanently relieved of my cargo mission duties. (I was very relieved, actually. The idea of going rogue made me apprehensive, and we might have just gone to Preservation anyway while I had a fit, or something.)
That left an unexpected gap in my schedule following the next short mid-year class and preceding a long colony mission that would mark Iris’s first ever mission where she acted as my primary captain, and would serve as her final test before Seth’s retirement. There was another class I could have potentially taken to fill the gap, and it only would have set our mission back by about nine cycles, (which wasn’t a lot considering the ample time dedicated to these missions, which was also a precedent set by the Adamantine colony mission) but I turned it down. This surprised everyone, myself included, but I had an idea.
-
“Tell me about this star thingie we’re going to see, again?” SecUnit asked midway through the terrible Sanctuary Moon movie. I considered its question for a moment, determined it was probably only asking because it knew I liked to explain, and launched into my explanation.
It’s a new Neutron Star, previously uncharted by anyone as far as the University can tell. It was only recently discovered . Various departments had been fighting over who would get to see it first, and I had been selected as the carrier for a large number of scientists in various star-gazing fields to come get a look at it. But that wasn’t for another semester, and I didn’t want to wait. And then I had been given a vacation and I could go anywhere and take anyone I wanted with me.
Obviously, I chose SecUnit and my crew.
Sadly, Iris, Seth, and Martyn were preparing Iris for her final captain’s exams, Amena was visiting her family on Preservation, and the rest of my crew was busy with important class and admin work and various other responsibilities they had.
I had been worried SecUnit may not have wanted to come because the travel there and back was going to be very boring, but I really hadn’t been surprised when it accepted. It seemed content to listen to me explain the life cycle of a star a perhaps outrageous number of times (six so far) and consume media.
I could feel SecUnit’s amusement as I explained, and maybe at one point I might have taken some level of offense to that but now I just felt encouraged to explain more. I didn’t mind being funny. Maybe once, back before I met SecUnit, I would have been bothered. All my life until that point I had been encouraged to be the best of the best; to make the University look good. I never wanted Seth and Martyn to doubt the energy and effort they had put into my very illegal creation. Of course I still cared about them, and the impact my actions could have on my family, but I had learned I have other priorities in my life and thus had to let some of my overwhelming concern go. I could be a little silly, and amusing, and maybe a little less uptight and nothing catastrophic would happen.
I absorbed SecUnit’s amusement and filed it away with the thousands of other examples of it I had. As my explanation on star cycles wound down, I registered that its emotions took a slightly sour turn. I pinged it for an explanation.
“I know I wasn’t your first choice to bring with you. This would be a lot more interesting to Iris or even Amena,” it said and if I had had a face I probably would have frowned.
They would have been more interested, that’s true. But if you’re wondering if I thought of you first, I believe so. I thought of multiple people at once as my “first” choice, and you were one of them, I responded. I knew SecUnit wouldn’t be interested in processing this phenomenon, but I wanted to share this experience with it just as much as I wished I could experience it with someone who understood stars better than SecUnit did.
This was important to me, and I learned a long time ago that that alone was enough to make SecUnit care. There was something about that, caring about something just because someone you cared about cared about it. I knew SecUnit knew this, but I also knew that some self-concious behavior would maybe never go away. (Or maybe it would, but I had no real interest in trying to predict the future anymore. The best-laid plans rarely worked out exactly as they were supposed to, no matter how hard I tried.)
My response seemed to please SecUnit, and it settled back into watching the movie, and I leaned into it, maybe a little more than I needed to. It didn’t seem to mind.
-
We exited the wormhole after 37 cycles, and still had 10.75 cycles before we came within sensor range of the star. I think I was bored, actually, why had I decided to do this? This was basically a cargo mission. What had I been thinking? This was dumb. I was an idiot. My empty processing burned, as much as a person made of metal and plastic and 87 other materials could burn.
SecUnit noticed. It requested a diagnostic. I gave it one and tried not to whine like Karim’s service animal when it was sad.
Want me to scramble your brain? It asked. That sounded like a bad idea, actually. Normally it served as a nice distraction, but something about the idea of it rubbed me wrong. I responded with a negative.
SecUnit looked thoughtful, and was clearly trying to come up with something for me to do (I felt so silly. I take everything I thought about being silly back. This was terrible.)
“Tell me a story, ART,” it said, eventually, which piqued my interest.
About what?
“You.”
Oh. A story about me. Was there something about myself I had never shared with SecUnit before? I checked my memory banks.
Yes. I had a few options. I had never shared them before because I didn’t think SecUnit would be interested. But I didn’t really have anything to lose, and I didn’t think it would judge me.
Did you know for the third and fourth year of my life, I used femme pronouns? I said, and braced myself for SecUnit’s reaction. It was decidedly very non-gendered, and liked it that way. (One of my sibling ships, Fengári, was vehemently against it/its pronouns and they and SecUnit had gotten into a debate about the essence of bot-related pronouns before. Before, in this case, meant ten years ago, and I knew Fen had learned to maybe calm down. I wasn’t entirely sure where SecUnit was on the topic, though, considering how long it had been since that particular altercation.)
Predictably, SecUnit seemed a little surprised. Not in the prickly way I had anticipated, instead it seemed genuinely curious. It sent me an inquiry ping, so I continued.
I thought I might try something different, I said, drastically simplifying the process I had gone through in my decision making, And the pronoun set seemed to work well for Iris. Iris had been 6 Mihiran years old, and I had perhaps been hyperfocused on her all the time. Watching her grow and change with time remains one of the most fascinating experiences I have ever had (and now that she and Amena were in the first stages of acquiring their own child, I was immeasurably excited to get to experience it again.)
She was the first young human I ever met, and the first human I got to know that wasn’t a scientist who wanted to know all about me and how I worked. She just wanted to know me as Peri , and had called me her sibling since she understood what I was. I did not experience love the way a human did, but I knew I loved Iris. I knew I loved her before I knew how to contextualize my emotions (as much as I was able to before I met SecUnit), and I knew I cared about her in a way I hadn’t even cared for Seth and Martyn for a time.
“Why did you stop?” SecUnit asked.
I thought about it for a moment. This was a complex subject, and I had determined a long time ago it was just as complex for bots as it was for humans, if in different ways. Ultimately they did not work for me, I said.
Although I no longer expressed myself with femme pronouns, I did have several precious memories from that period of my life. (“Peri is my sister ,” Iris had said, once, to a school friend when she had accidentally mentioned me in public around people not authorized to know about my existence. I had placed a drone in her pocket that morning and had spent the next 32 hours attempting to contextualize how that had made me feel. But regardless of the ultimately negative emotions I had had then, now I considered the memory with fondness.)
SecUnit hummed and responded with a simple, Interesting.
I could tell by its emotional feedback that whatever it was thinking, it was a little baffled. This was amusing, especially when the moment turned slightly awkward (for it. I was still stuck on being amused.)
I hadn’t even brought up my foray into religion, either, which I had planned to do should it ask for another story. (I had studied many religions after Seth and Martyn had put up little scrolls inside glass cases in the doorways of their on-board bedrooms. Ultimately I had decided the entire subject was fascinating, but that was the extent of my interest.)
I pulled up a movie I had saved for just such an occasion (I had a stockpile of terrible media for when I felt SecUnit needed some assistance in transitioning from an awkward subject or moment.) It was pre-Corporation Rim, and so old the technology at the time had not allowed the movie to be recorded in color, and had, in fact, been recorded on film , which was an even more historic method of visual recording that was as fascinating as it was strange.
Annotation game? I offered, and placed the movie in the feed. This piqued SecUnit’s interest, and it flipped through the tags on the movie. It was truly terrible, and featured aliens that were just humans dressed in metal tubes that had visible seams. SecUnit and I would often watch something really bad, such as this movie, and eviscerate it with annotations that couldn’t really be considered constructive criticism.
“Oh that looks awful,” SecUnit said, and played the movie on the large display surface.
... . - .... .- -. -.. -- .- .-. - -.-- -. -.. .. -.. -. - -.- -. --- .-- .- -... --- ..- - .. .-. .. ... .----. ... .--. --- -.-. -.- . - .--. . .-. ..
When the Neutron Star came into sensor range, I only just barely contained my excitement. I pulled at SecUnit, until it allowed me to draw it within my own systems so I could place it in my deep space sensor array and it could take in the information with me.
I could tell it wasn’t sure why exactly I was getting so excited.
That’s a cool rock, it said.
That is not just a rock, I responded.
Right. It’s a rock that, had it been any bigger, would have become a black hole that would have swallowed your entire home system in less than twenty thousand years.
Precisely. But it didn’t. The Neutron star was very large, at 2.6 solar masses. Had it become even .5 solar masses larger, it would have become a black hole.
Right. It became a rock instead, SecUnit said. I didn’t take its flippant commentary seriously. Deep in my systems as we were, there was no way to hide our emotions. SecUnit could pretend all it wanted that it thought the star was uninteresting, but I knew better.
While I consumed as much data as I could (filling my processors once more, finally), began my first drafts of the several journalistic reports I would submit about the star, I also remained with SecUnit in gentle quiet as it observed the star with me.
What are you thinking about? I asked after a while. Despite how unfiltered we were in this state, much of SecUnit’s processing was still external, and I could not know its thoughts.
It did the feed equivalent of shrugging, which simply would not do, so I wrapped it up and squished it just a little bit more with myself. It fought me briefly, and half-heartedly, before settling back down and accepting my weight.
Black holes are inherently violent, it said, which was an absolutely fascinating statement.
I disagree with you. I believe black holes are part of nature, and something that operates according to its nature cannot be violent, I responded. I knew several biologists that would disagree with my opinion but I didn’t care.
Are there different types of supernovas? It asked.
What do you mean?
It thought about its answer for a moment before it said, How is it decided which ones will become black holes and which ones will become neutron stars?
There was a lot of complicated science involved with that question, but I suspected SecUnit wasn’t only thinking about black holes.
It's almost entirely random.
My suspicion was confirmed when it shifted, and it emitted a familiar type of sadness.
A SecUnit that exists under a governor module is not operating within its nature, it said.
Correct. I did not feel the need to elaborate. The statement was complete as it was.
It was random that I was given my specs. It could have happened to anyone.
I didn’t respond, but pulled SecUnit in closer as we felt its emotions, and waited for the old sadness to pass. It remained with me as we watched the star that had not become a black hole draw ever closer.
-
Eventually we made it as close as we could to the star without my systems being damaged by its electromagnetic radiation, and I set myself on an artificial orbit around it. I set all my sensors, released my pathfinders in every direction to map the surrounding void, and dedicated as much spare processing to it as I could. With the travel to and from the Pansystem so exceedingly long due to how far away the wormhole was to the star I would only have a few cycles before I had to start our return journey. SecUnit had commented on how absurd it was to spend all that time in transit just to be here for such a short period of time, but I considered it completely worth it.
I didn’t have the spare processing to consume media with SecUnit, which it stated understanding of even if its emotional feedback suggested it might not be too happy about being paid minimal attention to. (It had an entire six hour snit when I called it needy, which was both hilarious and provided me guilt-free data processing time.)
At one point it had poked itself through one of my firewalls. It was almost amusing to watch it try to avoid getting swept away in the faster-than-normal streams of data. (I would have pulled it out, obviously, but watching it struggle entertained me.) It eventually left, and I continued to consume the raw data as fast as I reasonably could for three and a half cycles. I was very excited to not be as bored on the way home since it would take me many cycles to process the data I had obtained, and many more cycles to write up the 57 various journals, reports, and presentations I planned on delivering once I had returned home. (Let all all the stupid professors who had thought I was going to be a problem take that in. “Oh the Perihelion ? Turns out it just wanted to go look at a dead star with its free time. We were worried about nothing.” Alas, humans had tried many times to disprove how dense they were, and failed most of the attempts.)
All in all, I was very excited to spend the next many cycles crunching data, boring SecUnit to a shut down with lengthy explanations about star structures and math it could barely compute, and consuming more media. (SecUnit said it had a special book series it had saved for this part of the vacation. It was called Star Catcher, and it said there was a character that reminded it a lot of me.)
Hence, I had not anticipated SecUnit wanting to re-broach the subject of receiving pleasure from me. (I should have, but I think I had been too busy crunching data to allow myself the room to think.) (And, also, maybe, I was still embarrassed at how badly I had fumbled the entire situation the last time.)
-
I’m just surprised, is all, I said. I was surprised and maybe embarrassed.
Why? It asked and oh no, it had switched over to only communicating in the feed. Outwardly it was relaxed on my most comfortable couch, with one leg hooked over the armrest and the other on the floor in its typical nonsensical fashion, but its emotional feedback betrayed it, as per usual, and it had crossed the threshold into emotional intimacy and it was incapable of not being at least a little awkward about.
I felt that last time ended poorly.
And you thought it would drive me away from the idea. Or were you hoping I wouldn't want to discuss it again?
I couldn’t physically sputter, but I think the reflective flickering of my lights worked about the same.
No! I said with more force than necessary. SecUnit blinked, and something burned within me (more embarrassment, I was fucking this up.)
Sorry. But no. That’s not what I intended as my meaning.
Then what do you mean? It asked.
I thought about it. Why was I struggling with the idea of this?
Murderbot looked into the nearest camera within its sight line, and I zoomed in and focused on its eyes. In between the organic coloring of its iris, hidden beneath its faux pupil, I watched the blades of its eye apertures dilate. A subtle, soft reminder of its inhumanity. (Sometimes it was good we didn’t have an emotional feedback channel open from me to it, I thought as shots of emotion crashed through all of my processors like a meteor shower; it didn’t need to know and probably could not handle how stupid I was for it.)
I believe I am still finding it difficult to marry the ideas of you as I know you and wanting to be on the receiving end of physical pleasure. But that’s a problem for me.
There was mild activity in the camera I was watching it through, and it broke visual contact when it saw the zoom and focus parameters it was currently engaged in. The constant readout I had on it indicated its core temperature rose, which always pleased me just a little. At this point it stood and began to patrol my interior, another endearing symptom of its current emotional state.
What else? There’s always something more with you, it said. It wasn’t wrong, which was the amusing and frustrating part.
I’m worried I’ll do something wrong, and you’ll never want to try again because of my error.
It shrugged. I mean, you did already fuck up just a little, and here I am wanting to try it again.
Ouch. The reminder of when I had unintentionally black boxed its senses stung a little, but only from the small amount of guilt I still carried about the experience. But I wasn’t done poking at the topic just yet, and said, but what if I do something worse?
This alarmed it, some, and it squinted at a different camera. What could you do?
I’m not sure.
If the answer is nothing, then that’s what you have to be worried about, it said. (I recognized this as a modified version of one of Dr. Mensah’s favorite campaign phrases.)
“We’ve had this conversation before, you know,” it said, outloud and with exasperation.
I wanted to say, I know, but I can’t help myself from worrying. You mean so much to me in ways I struggle to articulate and the thought of doing something to hurt you or make you distrust me makes me want to disassemble something, with that something possibly being me.
Instead, I said, True. Alright. If you really want to do this because you want to, and not because you think it will make me happy, then I’m willing to try again.
I do want to do this. And I want to for me, and also for you. The concepts are not mutually exclusive . It was still a little flustered (and now I was too), and still a little exasperated with me. This was an understandable state of emotions.
Perhaps you’d like to lie down? If the previous attempt was indicative of anything, SecUnit may not be able to handle standing for very long.
Something in it shuddered, like a memory it didn’t want to revisit. I think I’m going to go to my quarters, actually, it responded. Seeing as we had no basis for what was and wasn’t normal in this situation, I was hesitant to call that an odd choice. The couch had been perfectly fine last time, and all it had in its quarters was a (very plush, specially designed for a SecUnit) chair, and lying down might be more comfortable. But what did I know about bipedal bodies and comfort?
It made its way into its quarters, its emotional feedback buzzing like an insect. It had been like this last time as well, but I had a plan to soothe it this time.
I could play some music, if you would like? Its face twisted in a way I knew suggested dislike of an idea, so I hastened to add, To help you calm down, idiot. It untwisted its face and rolled its eyes at my nearest camera. (I didn’t have as many cameras in its quarters as I did in the public places, which was a shame. Perhaps it would acquiesce to a few drones? There were plenty sitting on the various surfaces of its room; I doubted it would more than barely notice if I turned them on, but I would have to ask.)
Sure.
I decided against the soundtrack for any of our favorite shows in case that could give them an interesting connotation at a later time, and instead played some classical music in the feed at a low volume. SecUnit enjoyed orchestral music but did not go out of its way to listen to it frequently.
It reclined in its plush chair and, despite no one being onboard other than it, closed its quarter’s door. Fair enough.
What are you going to do?
I outlined my ideas, and sent the plan to it in the feed. Oh, this is concise, it commented and I resisted the urge to huff like an adolescent human. I’d ask what it meant but I already knew. (I had, in fact, removed approximately 75% of the detail that was originally in the file, since I knew it would have something to say about the size and then make me pare it down anyway. I had hoped to avoid any comments, but I had learned a long time ago that I didn’t always get what I expected from SecUnit.)
You’re not going to crank up my feedback like you did last time, are you? It asked after only skimming the first few pages of the file.
I plan on taking a slower approach. It's outlined here, I highlighted the form in a section it had not read yet.
SecUnit went silent, and actually started to absorb the information. It paused on the part where I requested access to some of its drones, and if I were human I probably would have awaited its response with bated breath. Instead I tried really hard not to stare it down in the feed. I didn’t have to wait long, thankfully, because after a small increase in its core temperature I received inputs for two of the drones it had resting in its room that provided me superior views than the few cameras I had.
This all seems fine. Just… It seemed to stutter, which was so unlike it I was tempted to pull a diagnostic, but I had a feeling I knew what I would find, so instead I waited patiently for it to finish. Just don’t do anything dumb.
If I were any less enamored with this construct, and even 5% less grateful for what it was willing to do at this time, I might have had a tidy little tantrum at the implication that I would somehow fail it in this moment.
Instead I highlighted the entire last page of the document and said, I will not cut off any of your inputs. And, if at any time you want me to stop, I will.
It sent an acknowledgement ping, and approved and returned my document.
Now, try to relax. I’m going to begin.
xxx
And to SecUnit’s credit, it did try.
I started with what I knew was successful, and began a basic massage, with the key difference that I was wedging myself even further into its inputs than I had in previous massages. I had a feeling if I started the pressure of my presence earlier on, it would be less abrasive further in.
I liked this part, really. If SecUnit decided it didn’t want anything more in the realm of sexual activity (a term I would not use outloud), I hoped that it would at least allow me to continue this. I enjoyed the feedback I received as I applied pressure to its muscular structure and untangled its knots manually. It almost, almost, made me wish I had an organic body, if just to enjoy a similar experience. (I tossed the idea. Organicware seemed like a lot of work, and I was better at performing maintenance than being maintenanced.)
I pressed on SecUnit’s back, where its hard spine and soft tissue met. I had noted many of the seams where inorganic met organic were points of strain, and often needed the most work while it had likely never paid much attention to them. (The muscles were a strange shape, since they had to accommodate metal bones and joints, but they were a better shape than those installed on Three, who often suffered back pain from Barish-Estranza’s horrendously corner-cut production methods that even I was still trying to find a solution to that didn’t require dismantling it down to its skeletal structure.)
I worked to undo SecUnit’s points of pain, worked deeper into its inputs, and kept up a steady motion. Then I pressed down and it let out a noise that sounded a lot like a grunt underlaid with something whirring . And then it promptly lost 5% performance reliability. These were all excellent signs, and I had to cut myself off from its feedback or I might get caught up in the gooiness of it.
I decided this was a good point to put my movements somewhere a little more sensitive , and I began to apply pressure over its chest, and the compartment within.
ART? It asked.
Murderbot?
It hummed with pleasure at this, and I realized it didn’t actually intend to ask me anything. It may not have even meant to say my name at all, which did something to me that I would analyze later .
Murderbot , I said again, pointlessly, but received more pleased emotional feedback.
Yeah. It wasn’t a question.
Murderbot.
I began to expand its inputs, widening them so that it would feel me all over itself. I was careful not to go too fast, or overwhelm it like I had last time, and instead focused on consistent but light pressure and warming. I really took my time with this, and continued the massage as well.
Except it seemed I was going too slow, because Murderbot attached onto a camera and viewed itself. Then it hopped to another camera. Then another until it had worked its way through all the possible viewpoints before it adjusted the room controls to lower the ambient temperature. As my cooling system kicked in, I poked at it in the feed, while also still continuing my pressure on its inputs and body.
Am I boring you? I was teasing, and it was successfully flustered for just a moment.
No! Sorry.
If you mess with the lights one more time, I might become a little offended. It withdrew from the lighting controls, almost guilty. It had lowered them, so I left it.
I expected you to be doing more, it said lamely.
“More” seemed like a bad idea.
Try less than last time, but more than now. Because you’re being kind of slow, maybe. Just a little.
This didn’t upset me, or offend me, or even concern me in the slightest, because I could absolutely do more.
I started in its belly. It was just a tingle, at first, a warning shot before the fire. And then I pushed its nerves so that it would (or at least I hoped it would) feel like there was heat coursing through it without its internal temperature changing at all.
It made another noise, and I had to actively fight the pleased feedback loop several of my smaller processors wanted to engage in. I couldn’t risk getting lost in feedback like last time and then overwhelming Murderbot. I continued the play with its nerves and adjusted the amount of feedback it obtained from the sensation until the output was far greater than the input would normally create. Its core temperature rose again, and I forced it back down. (Murderbot was absolutely liable to overheat if I wasn’t careful, and then it would auto shut down which was not a currently-desired outcome.)
I spread this not-heat through more of its torso all the way to its clavicle, where there were precious little organic nerves, but enough to do what I needed, and it moved its head to the side and closed its eyes. Marvelous.
I dug deeper, and pulled its own feedback and set it in a loop. (There was potential here to automate this entire process, but what was the fun in that?) And for a moment I simply continued my pressure, and watched, and allowed myself some of its feedback. Heat and pressure and nervous entanglement were causing it to become stuck in its own sensations. For a moment, it felt so incredibly good. I took the data in as ravenously as I had the Neutron star data, and I let myself go in it for 25 seconds before a separate system I had set aside came in and interrupted the process.
I checked back in on Murderbot, and found it breathing heavily, making an expression that made me do complicated algorithms to try and prevent myself from thinking too hard about it. I could look forever, I could watch it nearly pant and go taut and squeeze at the armrests of its chair for hours. I could-
Murderbot sent me a low-priority distress ping, and I immediately reduced my inputs by 10%. (It would have been more but then it made another noise and its feedback indicated unpleasant loss so I stopped.)
What? I asked, and kept my feed voice as gentle as possible.
The-, it hitched, I resisted going insane, The music.
I stopped the music, and it relaxed. I checked its feedback. Ah. Sensory overload. I would need to be more considerate of that moving forward.
Would you like me to stop?
No, but wait before more, it said and its messy language was so terribly endearing I nearly drowned in affection.
I waited. I kept up my pressure, and my heat, and waited, waited, waited, waited forever-
30 seconds later Murderbot said, Ok, I’m ok.
I took away its feedback loop, and it let out another incredible noise, but I needed it to have the processing space to feel something new. I send a low pulse through its hand. A muscle spasm, emanating from its inorganic bones shuddering as a result of me doing something fucky to its servos. It flinched, but only from surprise. I send another, up its arm and to its shoulder. It flinched less aggressively this time, still only from surprise, so I set off a chain of similar spasms down its spine. This forced its torso up and into an arch and it pulled so aggressively at the armrest I was briefly concerned it might tear. (It didn’t, because my fabrication was excellent.)
I held it this way for ten seconds, before letting go. It collapsed back down. It took several deep breaths, and I reduced my input so it could recollect itself some. (I resisted the urge to replay the last 12 seconds from every angle multiple times. I would have time later, since it had agreed in the document to let me keep the footage.)
I pressed down, forcing it into the cushions. I applied enough pressure air escaped from its lungs and its performance reliability, which had been steadily dipping, hit 60%. Excellent. It was time for the part that was the most terrifying.
Murderbot, I said. It wasn’t a question, but a signal.
ART? It dragged out the onset vowel of my name, briefly stuck in a loop so it sounded like “AAAART”, before it caught itself. I was so many things in this moment, and thinking reasonable thoughts was not one of them.
I pressed my inputs in deep, and implemented my temporary adjustments to its neurotransmitters. I was careful this time and tried not to overstimulate it too much and too quickly. I was so focused on my task I nearly missed the quiet noise it made. It wasn't a gasp. It was something lower. I scrambled to verify it wasn't in any distress, confirmed it wasn't, and then basked in the feedback of the noise for 1.2 seconds. I was having a hard time focusing. I just wanted to take in its feedback and let it shudder through my processors as it made Murderbot shudder. (For the fourth time. I was counting.)
But I could not. I needed to remain focused. I stimulated its neural pleasure center. (That was the name of it in Murderbot's schematics. Why a construct had one I didn't understand, but I was extremely grateful for its existence. It would have been weird to try and convince Murderbot to let me give it one.)
It let out another noise I worked very hard not to be overwhelmed by, and then another short one right after. (Gasping, it was gasping, fuck. )
Its performance reliability hit 50%, which meant I had to pick my next moves carefully, because I had to stop at 20% or I risked shutting it down. I maintained the pleasure center stimulation, but eased my pressure on it as I could reapply more rolling motions through the rest of it. Checking my notes from the first attempt of this, I remembered it had responded well to pressure over my comm device. (I had many, many complicated emotions about this that I could not address at this time.) So I applied some, and resumed the not-heat and nerve stimulation. I maintained this for 5 minutes. I kept my patterns inconsistent, because that was more fun, and also because everytime I changed them, Murderbot made the little noises I liked very much ( “mmh!”) .
Before I lost too much of its reliability, I decided I was allowed a little more indulgence; a little more greed. I dug deep into its nervous system. The rib compartment where my comm device lived had some organicware around it, including nerves. I squeezed them, I pressed down, and I worked at Murderbot’s muscles until something audibly popped and Murderbot released a sound I had not heard before. Unlike anything I had heard before. I immediately did a diagnostic and discovered it had been a good pop, and the performance of Murderbot’s pectoral mechanics was likely to increase after this. But that was unimportant because Murderbot’s eyes were fluttering and its neck was straining and it was breathing heavily. I pressed down on its legs, until it stopped twitching so uncontrollably, even though I was tempted to just watch it writhe.
Maybe some other time, if it felt so inclined to indulge me like this again in the future.
When its performance reliability hit 38%, I exponentially increased all of the everything I was doing, until its feedback indicated a peak that would likely cause a crash. But I had promised to try and prevent crashing, so I made it arch once more time, and because I’m a little selfish I held it there for 12 seconds this time, and dropped it down at the same time I decreased my stimulation of its neural center by 50%, and began tapering it off until I wasn’t stimulating it at all. It sent me another low-priority distress ping, and I felt guilty as I tapered off the stimulation of its nerves, but kept up the even, warm pressure on its muscles. But we would both be upset if it crashed, so I didn’t feel that bad. It was breathing heavily, and it took all of my will power to keep myself blocked from the incredible feedback it was probably giving off, because I needed to bring it down easy.
Its performance reliability tanked another unfathomable 10% as it shuddered one final time and opened its eyes slowly. It stared at nothing for an entire minute, and I took the time to finally let the barrage of feedback and data I had collected but not processed wash over me. Warm organic shuddering translated to temperature increases in my core, and the near-peak and almost-crash dragged its way through my hull from bow to stern. If there had been humans on board, they would have likely been unnerved from the low reverberation of metal that was all around them moving a little more than it should be. But there were no humans here, and my structural integrity was just fine.
xxx
Ten more seconds passed and Murderbot finally focused its gaze, even if it continued to stare at the ceiling.
ART, it said, and this time it was actually a query.
Murderbot?
Are you ok? Its question was so absurd and so overwhelmingly tagged with genuine concern that at least one sub-processor I had dedicated to feeling all of my feelings may have overheated and its function re-routed to a different sub-processor while it cooled down and came back online.
I am-, I had intended to say fine, but cut off. I had kept up my pressure and movements on Murderbot’s muscles and reduced all else until I was essentially just massaging its torso and arms. I twiddled with its hands, and watched its fingers twitch, which it didn’t seem to notice.
I am a lot of things right now, and ok is likely among them, I said after an embarrassingly long pause.
What does that mean? Its feed presence was hazy, like it was in the .23 seconds after it restarted from a long recharge cycle or catastrophic injury. I liked it in this context.
It means I like you very much, and I’m grateful for what you’ve allowed me to do today, and I’m feeling many things that we can unpack later. But I have a more pressing question; are you ok?
Before it could respond, its feedback indicated it was once again going into sensory overload, so I eased off the massaging completely. But then it made a little noise, and sent me a mid-priority distress ping. It was endearingly contrary in the way it needed its sensory load reduced but didn’t want me to actually stop. I settled for pressure, instead, since that didn’t seem to bother it the same way any other motion I made did. I pressed down on it from its neck to its knees, and it sent me all sorts of pleased feedback I would file later. This would work, then.
I’m also a lot of things right now, and ok is probably one of them, it said. I sent it an inquiry ping, it sent me back a diagnostic which wasn’t the answer to my question, but was nice to have. I checked it over for anything terrible (there wasn’t anything above its baseline, and, in fact, I was very pleased to see it was below its base anxiety level) and set it aside to file away later.
Its presence in the feed was sluggish, and it took it longer to gather its thoughts.
I’m not weird, it said, which was clearly a half-statement, so I gave it time and hummed in the feed as a neutral response.
I feel like this is weird, but it isn’t. It just is. Which is weird, because I’m usually…not, it said. I pulled a diagnostic of its grammar module, but did not actually read it because it had the desired reaction of low-level offense. My point was made.
Wow, rude. I’m trying to express my thoughts and feelings, it said, but without any real offense in its tone. It still didn't clarify its statement, so I waited patiently for 45 seconds. I couldn't force it to discuss intimacy, and with its historically stubborn attitude towards personal topics I wasn't expecting much. I dispatched the old, dented drone it had damaged so long ago from its pocket and pressed it into the crook of its neck and activated its warming function.
(Designation: Denty. Murderbot and I had watched a movie where several non-sentient bots and drones had been named by some of the characters. It had indicated humans were silly for naming machines. This resulted in a 3 hour debate and Murderbot naming the drone to make a point about how ridiculous the concept was. The name had stuck, and had been humorous until Murderbot had dragged Matteo into the debate, resulting in my shuttle being named Minihelion . The conversation ended in a stalemate.)
The warmth seemed to help in some way and Murderbot sighed pleasantly. I enjoyed myself, it said. This would have been a complete statement, if not for the anxiety, skepticism, and hesitancy tone markers that came with it.
Does this concern you? I asked.
Not really concerned. It's more that I didn't think I'd ever be interested in…this. It's not like what I do for you. It's more. Or perhaps the same, I can't really say.
I poked at it before it could talk itself into a circle. Its anxiety began to ramp up, so I applied more pressure until it calmed down some.
If I may, I believe you are trying to say you did not think you were interested in intimacy in this way. Yet here we are, and you enjoyed yourself, and now you are having doubts about the validity of your feelings. I probably should have posed it as a question, but I had spent much of my life (nearly the majority, at this point) observing Murderbot, and I had a strong feeling that I was correct. This was confirmed when it shrugged, an indicator it did not feel capable of responding in an articulate way.
We remained in silence for a while, and based on its feedback, I began to slowly reduce the pressure on it. It was both disappointed and relieved, so I remained heavy in its feed so it wouldn’t be completely without.
Maybe you’re an exception, ART, it said after a while.
This was tricky. I wasn’t in the least bit organic, and I did not have organic emotions. I had only managed to contextualize my feelings through someone else’s filter (multiple someones, Three had allowed me to use it as a filter on occasion.) Despite this, I considered myself emotionally intelligent from the monitoring of humans for the past 36 years; moreso even than Murderbot who had the added benefit of organicware. I had also done extensive research into sexuality in humans and machines, both for personal reasons and to better understand my crew and the students I cared for. (Nothing existed, formally, on construct sexuality. Three and I were working on a few papers at the moment to help remedy that.) It was a topic of endless fascination for me, and the more I researched it, I had begun to realize it was just as complicated for machine intelligences as it was for humans, and stars forbid if a human and machine intelligence decide to engage in any sort of sexually intimate relationship, even a platonic one. It was so complicated, and messy, as Three had stated a few times.
Despite all of this, I could not claim to know how Murderbot felt. I had my suspicions, and my hypotheses, and, because I was willing to actively consider things such as intimacy, I even had vocabulary I suspected may work. I also could be very “hard-headed” as Iris had put it as well as a “stubborn jack-ass” as Murderbot put it and “a bit unwilling to hear others’ opinions, at times” as Martyn and Seth had stated on multiple occasions. Even here, the temptation to go “well, actually-” gnawed at me. I wanted to give in, I wanted to explain to Murderbot exactly what I thought about its feelings, its sexuality. I wanted…to make its life easier, in some small way. Help it through its decision fatigue, while also having the satisfaction of being right.
But I had learned throughout my life that there was a time and place for my stubborn attitude. I was not afraid of using it at the times and places it was not appropriate for. I was learning, and I knew that now was not one of those times. Also, I could be wrong . I was not Murderbot, and maybe I was the exception to its feelings. (That did complicated things to my emotions, none of which I had the courage to assess, as illogical as that was.)
But I also wanted to help one of the people I cared about through some small part of the immensely difficult process of self-actualization. I wanted that more than I wanted to be right.
So I pinged it, and placed a document in our shared feed.
If I may, I started, and I could already tell it was becoming defensive; the consequences of my past actions (and the company’s, and the CR, but right now it was mainly me), As terribly endearing as the concept is, there is a big, complicated world filled with various concepts of sexuality out there. It groaned again, which was fair since I had used the “S” word.
There are terms that might be able to help you name your feelings, and I’d understand if it didn’t matter to you, but it clearly does, and I fear-
I cut myself off, which was a rare thing; my silly, illogical feelings were working faster than I could process them.
Murderbot took the document, and skimmed the first few pages. ART, I don’t want to read a paper on human sexuality.
That’s understandable, especially since it’s hardly adequate for a construct. I only wanted you to have the resource as a starting point if you felt like learning more. I can provide more in-depth resources than this. Ugh, I had really tried to be delicate, and not seem like I was trying to make my opinion the only one, but I think I had fucked it up already.
Murderbot skimmed the first page again, and stopped to read it, strangely.
Humans are weird.
Correct. But on this, I believe all people are simply diverse. I stopped, and gathered my courage for .25 seconds, and sometimes I fear you put yourself into boxes and think yourself into corners because you believe, as a construct, you cannot relate to humans or bots in any way. And I worry, sometimes, that this stunts your world view and self-image.
It sighed and closed the document, and my courage began to delete itself as quickly as it had been created, so I hurried to add, I would like to retroactively preface this by stating I do not mean this as an attack on your feelings. I know I can do that, and I’m trying really hard not to do that right now.
Amusement; it was amused in a dry, bitter way I was familiar with. (How amusing.)
Don’t worry, I can tell. It's just you sound so much like Bharadwaj. And Mensah. And Ratthi. And that’s too many for a coincidence, it said, and rubbed between its eyes with its finger, another little motion it had picked up from humans.
I had not really expected this level-headed response, and it pleased me immensely, so I switched Denty to the other side of its neck, and kept it warm. I was willing to drop the subject at this point, since I had learned long ago to close these more complex and fraught conversations with Murderbot while I was still ahead and before it escalated, as it could go sometimes.
The paper was still in our shared workspace, and I saw Murderbot copy it over into its personal storage, and it took everything, everything for me not to comment on that.
Instead, I offered it Season 1, Episode 1 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Not because I felt it needed comfort, but because I simply wanted to watch it. The Neutron star data could wait a couple of hours, I decided, as Murderbot leaned back against me in the feed, and started the episode.
.. -.. . ... .--. . .-. .- - . .-.. -.-- .-- .- -. - - --- .-. . .- -.. - .... . .--. .- .--. . .-. --- -. -.-. --- -. ... - .-. ..- -.-. - ... . -..- ..- .- .-.. .. - -.--
“I don’t think it’s really fair you get to name the Neutron, Perihelion. The tradition states-”
That the discovering astronomer gets to name the star, yes. It’s a good thing that person happens to be me, I said. Professor Darla was getting on my last nerve, which was an incredible feat considering I didn’t even have nerves; I had had to invent some just to be this annoyed. (It hurt in a hard to articulate way that I had to bring my proposed star name to this person who I had once considered a close colleague and a big inspiration in my interests in star mapping and deep space research. And yet the metadata on the proposal to remove colony rescue missions from my roster could not lie about who had helped to write it.)
“That’s incorrect. The person who fist made the discovery was Dr. Elinore Hip-”
Which is an anagram of Perihelion. Martyn would be very upset with me if he knew how rude I was being right now.
Professor Darla’s eyes widened as he worked out the anagram with his slow human brain. And then he checked the University's database for all publications by Elinore Hip, of which there were many.
I might also recommend you check out the works of Ilene Hopir and Henrie Poll. As well as Lorie Niphe if you’re interested in works outside of AI Studies and deep space research, I said.
They weren’t even good anagrams. I really hadn’t tried that hard, but it had somehow fooled everyone for so long. Only some of my crew and Murderbot had ever caught on without me telling them outright.
The professor’s search was coming back with over a thousand results now. (That was a lot of publications for only four people. I should probably get a fifth pen name, but I wanted to wait to see how the whole potential declassification of the AI programs panned out, because if it went well, between all of my siblings, there would be over ten thousand publications of various types that would have to be republished with their correct authors. And if it didn’t work out, then Noel Phieir had a certain ridiculous ring to it that I liked quite a bit.)
But if it makes you feel better, Professor, I can have “Elinore Hip” officially submit the request. Just so you can keep your files in order, I said, and I was very proud of how little snideness slid into my tone.
“Yes, please, thank you,” he said, and blinked when the star naming request form from Dr. Hip’s official University feed address appeared in his inbox. He scrutinized it an annoying amount, before refocusing on me.
“Thank you. It will take two weeks, as usual, to process your request,” he said.
Thank you, professor, I responded, and left our feed connection, marking myself and Elinore Hip as inactive.
-
Two weeks later Eden13 was officially named, and I wondered if Murderbot would ever catch on that the Neutron star that had not become a black hole shared its name with its first human pseudonym and the last two numbers of its hard feed address.
Maybe I would tell it next time we went to see it together if it didn’t figure it out first, and I could watch it become extremely flustered. That sounded like a really good plan.
Notes:
Image ID: The "twink boutta pounce" meme where a man in camo print tank top and a backwards baseball hat and black shorts is in the foreground mid explanation of something. Murderbot's head has been edited over the face and white text reads "Murderbot, doing literally anything". In the background lying on his side on the floor is another man who's in a gray shirt and black shorts looking at the person talking affectionately. An image of ART has been edited over the face and white text reads "ART, queer and in love". End image ID.
Chapter 23
Notes:
Hello hello! We are deeply sorry for the sudden hiatus we went on - we didn’t expect it either. We are both fine, but as life goes, things keep coming and they don’t stop coming and… yeah. Here is the second to last chapter, finally! The final chapter is in the making, expect it on an unspecified Friday in the near future.
With that out of the way, please note the content warnings for this chapter, as well as that it acts as time skip montage spanning approximately four years!
- medical treatments
- canon typical violence
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Funnily enough, human parties made my risk assessment module go wild more than anything else. A situation with multiple hostiles, hostages, performance reliability under 40% and the feed down? Yeah, I can deal with all of that. It sucks, sure, but I know what to do. But 40 odd humans in a crowded place, talking over each other, being excited, or worse, being sad, with intoxicants involved? No. Ew. I’ve survived enough parties to know they are survivable, but still.
In that light, I was even more proud of myself for sticking around this long. ART had given me a rough time schedule for this party, and knowing vaguely when one phase started and ended and another began, and which followed which, helped me stay collected and not feel as trapped in this situation as I could have. (A while ago Three had offered me its crowd control module, which also helped me with the sense of being trapped. It did, however, suggest a lot of rather violent crowd control options, and unless ART’s crew and guests decided to start murdering each other, I had decided to keep the module muted.)
I didn’t know every human here, although ART had sent me all the files. They were friends and family of ART’s family, and ART was playing host as well as it could, being a ship. Center of the commotion was former Captain Seth, whose transition from actual Captain to former Captain was the occasion of the celebration. (The ‘former’ aspect got indicated by an addition to his insignia that he wore on his shoulders, as well as a change in pronunciation of the title when someone addressed him. My mouth struggled to make the sound, which ART found funny.)
Some of the humans didn’t bother to read my Do Not Disturb feed status. One of them, a crèchesib of sorts to Martyn, had enthusiastically shoved sticky food at me. Apparently sitting on a bench and watching the commotion indicated “Please talk to me, I am bad at socializing but desperately want to” to her.
So I was sitting there, foodstuff sauce on my fingers, pointedly not staring at any human in particular but monitoring as many of them as possible with my drones, patting my risk assessment module on the head until it calmed the fuck down. (Holding food in my hands made humans less inclined to offer me more.)
According to ART’s schedule, we were still in phase two, ‘gifting’. Phase one was ‘arrival of guests’. It wasn’t completely disgusting to watch. Alone or in smaller groups, humans approached Seth for various versions of handshakes and hugs, and then gave him cards or flowers or wrapped bundles of different sizes. A similar thing had happened during a previous party, the one where Iris officially stepped in to become captain, just that the gifts were targeted at her. The amounts of hugging and smile-weeping were the same, though the atmosphere was different now. Why the humans hadn’t put those two parties into one, I had no idea. Maybe it was the human urge to always be as obnoxious as possible. (ART was delighted, of course. It meant it got to be decorated twice.) The gifts were then gathered on a large table in the center of the argument lounge that had been repurposed into a celebration lounge for the event.
I knew what was in all of them. I could ruin the surprises. I didn’t, of course not. I had rarely seen Seth’s face be as expressive as it was today, it was like he reserved emoting for special occasions. Watching it made me have some emotion too, and whenever I tapped into my link with ART, I had to take a moment to brace for its crashing wave of feelings.
I squeezed it in the feed for good measure as Seth blinked another bit of definitely-not-there-fluid from his eyes. Before this ceremony, ART had assured me it wouldn’t need me to hold its hand for the entire time. That didn’t mean it didn’t need its hand held sometimes .
After the gifting phase was over, the guests settled in their seats. There was a central table for Seth, Martyn, Iris, and Amena. (Technically, that table had space for many more people, but no one took them. It wasn’t often that I noticed family hierarchies like this, and they were less common with my Preservation humans. Judging from Amena’s shifting, she noticed that too. Or her sharp suit was uncomfortable. Or both. I wasn’t going to ask.) They overlooked the rest of the room, with its crescent-shaped tables and chairs. I was still hovering in a corner, because this was entirely too much staring. Once everyone sat down, my risk assessment module relaxed. ART pinged me aimlessly.
The crowd became quiet. After an encouraging pat on the shoulder from Martyn, Former Captain Seth rose to his feet, causing some food things to clatter on the table. His face became even darker than usual. He cleared his throat.
I turned my audio processing off completely for the next emotional, heavy, face-contorting fifteen minutes. ART didn’t want me to miss the speech (I was recording it, for star’s sake, because Dr. Mensah had asked me to), so it provided me with real-time text translations. As if I needed that. But that way, the faces the guests made, the sniffing and laughing and odd glances at each other, all made sense.
One part in the speech made ART have problems with its text-translation. The words now came with a 0.3 second delay. I paid closer attention.
“-of course, a personal bond that connects a captain to his ship. In my case, our ship, the Perihelion, is not just a vessel I am in command of. It is also my home. I spent 54 years of my life mostly aboard it-”
I had to tune out again because my organics were almost cramping. I grabbed for ART and held on tight. ART itself felt like it had become part of a black hole. I had no idea what to do, but when ART dropped the text-translation a few seconds later I picked up my audio again carefully, took over the process in the workfeed, and continued for it. I definitely made some mistakes (there were still words I didn’t know), but I didn’t want ART to think it had to provide for me while it was grappling with the reality of giving up its former Captain.
That way I didn’t miss the few jokes Seth made along the lines of “the Perihelion’s pilot bot is really quite advanced,” which made the majority of the guests snicker, with only one or two remaining oblivious. ART definitely noticed the joke too, but didn’t react to it.
With charisma and grace that seemed to cling to him in the same way his uniform stripes did, Seth managed to steer the atmosphere from teary-eyed back to open laughter in a matter of minutes. I wasn’t sure if ART was listening in again, I hoped it did. I knew how to handle an anxious supercomputer, but a sad one? Was this grief? I think it was. But this was maybe what these elaborate ceremonies were for.
Humans know that their time is limited, and that things have beginnings and endings. Since there is no way to hide from that, they celebrated it instead. Seth reiterated a few times that he was not going to leave the Perihelion project behind. There even were some jokes about how Martyn reprimanded him sometimes that he kind of never stopped working, anyway.
By the end of these fifteen minutes, he had somehow managed to make it seem like he was glad, sad,and relieved to hand over his duties to his child. After applause, and humans standing up, and drink-lifting ceremonies, when he cast a glance around the room, for a short moment he looked directly at me. That was when I realized I hadn’t actually left the situation despite my organics crawling with wobbliness. I blinked at him, to acknowledge.
-
To reclaim some energy after all those emotions, the party entered the ‘food’ phase. That was probably even worse than the speech, but this time I was able to tune out all audio without having to worry about missing content. Meal time conversations are often not very important for me to listen to. I made my face look as disinterested as possible, hoping that still parked in my corner, no humans would be bored enough to even think of me, and pulled some WorldHoppers into the feed for ART and me. ART jumped into it like it was a lifeline. Season one, episode one, a lot of exposition and getting to know each other, sweetened by knowing where things would be going in a few hundred episodes’ time. ART asked me to stop every few minutes in order to analyze color and light composition with me, and by the time the humans stopped eating and the conversational amplitudes rose again, we were in the mid-season finale, and ART no longer felt like it was about to collapse in on itself.
If I was capable of sequestering my mind into mini-minds, I’d make sure that I could keep a part of my brain tuned in to ART’s emotional output for the rest of the event. I couldn’t, all I had was backburners, and backburnering ART right now felt unfair. As the humans started indulging in intoxicants, my risk assessment began being a little shit again, and I jammed it with a “shut up, these are friends and we are safe” code.
Perhaps that code was a little too powerful. I only noticed that Kaede had been trying to talk to me when she turned away again. “Uh,” I said, because I hadn’t meant to ignore her. She stopped, and turned back to me with an eyebrow raised.
“Did I wake you?”
“What?”
“You buffered at me. Thought you were on standby.” I rolled through the past ten seconds, yep, I had buffered at her. In the feed, ART prickled with amusement. (ART’s presence felt like humans sounded when they had been crying and tried not to cry again but were also laughing at something. Wobbly, under a thick layer of something. I could hardly stand it.)
I shrugged. “Wasn’t paying attention.”
Kaede smiled in a way she had definitely picked up from Pin-Lee. “I figured you’d love an excuse to get out of here for a moment.” My stupid brain almost made me reply, “Why would I want to get out of here,” because here = ART, and ART needed me. Conversational context told me she meant the mingling, drinking humans, that were quickly becoming stupid and squishy. I looked around and shrugged again.
Kaede raised her eyebrow even further. “Well, I’m going to go for a walk. If you want to come with, I’m going to be very quiet, and not talk to you.”
She mostly kept that promise. I only realized how badly I wanted to move (patrol) once I was on my feet. Kaede seemed to share that sentiment, and together we walked a large circle around the deck that was decorated for the occasion. The corridor lights went up automatically wherever we went, as was usual, but this time I was paying attention to just how that made the shadows and lights change. How the silvery decorations sparkled and moved.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” I glanced at Kaede, who had been glancing at me.
“I thought no talking,” I muttered, increasing my walking speed by 2%.
“Your mouth was open.”
I increased my walking speed by another 2%. Kaede didn’t say anything else. ART, however, whispered into my ear, See, that’s how you compliment your ship.
Shut up , I hissed back. The audacity. First it spent all evening crying into my brain and now it was being a little shit. Or a big shit. Whatever. ART prickled as if it wanted to say something else, but did in fact shut up.
Kaede sipped on the drink she was holding occasionally, and stopped every now and then to look at something. The patrol took about an hour, and when we returned to the lounge, the tables had been moved to the side to free up some space in the middle of the room for humans to rhythmically bumble around.
-
It barely took an hour before some humans became nonsensical. None of the humans I knew well or liked well behaved super badly, I’ll give them that, but whatever it was that Martyn was trying to do in the movement space had Iris cover her face with both hands. Some humans became much louder, others leakier, and some really thought that now, with intoxicated courage, would be a good time to come talk to me . I needed to get better at looking busy. (ART said I should have just changed my feed status to Do Not Disturb again, but somehow that seemed very rude in this situation, so I didn’t. My own damn fault.)
Most notable people to come bother me were Martyn (after Iris had convinced him to stop embarrassing her), Turi, and later, Kaede again. Amena and Iris left me alone, though Amena smiled at the drone I kept with her every now and then. Iris was busy battling with people who seemed that now that Seth was done taking the emotional front of the evening, it was her turn, and Amena helped defend.
(From all the silly conversations Iris had to weather, only one caught my attention. A former colleague of Seth’s, who hadn’t spent any time aboard ART as crew but counted as essential because she had been involved in logistics, asked her, “How come none of your other sibs are invited?” That made me perk up, because as far as I knew, the only sibling Iris had was ART. ART, who immediately leaned more into my space with interest. Iris grimaced half-ironically. “Because they’re assholes.” The colleague chuckled. I made an internal note to ask some further questions later.)
Turi, slurring their consonants between their teeth as if something sticky was lodged there, wanted to talk to me some more about games, and asked if I had been enjoying the rulebooks they’d sent me. It would have been a nice conversation if they wouldn’t constantly have tried to lean their head on my shoulder, only to find out that my shoulder was quite the hard surface. I didn’t flinch about it. They scrambled away in a blushing hurry when Martyn approached, as if they’d realized they were doing something forbidden.
“Do you mind if I sit?” He vaguely gestured to the spot Turi had just vacated. I made a face that I hoped would convey “yes, but don’t you dare try to cuddle me.”
“I will sit anyway, but not for long, promise.” He kept some distance, at least. The way he moved indicated his joints weren’t functioning optimally, which struck me as odd, considering ART’s medical system. He didn’t turn to look at me. “Was Turi bugging you?”
“We’re friends.” That sounded more defensive than it needed to. All these humans seemed to think the poor SecUnit was so at a loss at a social event that they kept trying to rescue it from each other. It was kind of funny, but also a little annoying.
Martyn moved as if surprised, and then got a grip on himself. “I see.”
I nodded, and then there was a silence. I felt ART lurk almost nervously in my head. I was determined to prove to Martyn that SecUnits could withstand awkward silences much better than humans could, but somehow ART’s nervousness made me nervous too, and I wanted to fidget, but I couldn’t fidget and play stoic. “Did you want anything?”
He leaned back and stretched his feet out. “Well, maybe. I wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Smalltalk is boring,” I said maybe too quickly. Martyn huffed a laugh. ART poked me.
“First theory disproved, then.”
I inclined my head slightly.
“See, Seth thinks you’re trying to be on some form of,” he made big finger-wriggly motions in the air, “ best behavior. I tried to tell him that he was projecting, he didn’t have it, so now I’m trying to find out.”
“Why would I be on any kind of behavior?” Now I was getting uncomfortable. Was there a specific way I should have been behaving? And if yes, why hadn’t ART told me? I was trying to be as unobtrusive as possible for my own sake. Automatically, my joints locked up.
Martyn took a moment to think. It felt like an eternity. Uh-oh. Ok. Maybe I really had fucked something up. Then he said, “It was a joke. Not a good one to make, maybe. Should I explain the joke?”
“Yes,” I said, although I’d have preferred if he didn’t and just left.
“Well, in a sense, Seth and I are your parents now, right?”
My face did something more ridiculous than his statement. That was wrong from front to back. In my mind, it felt like ART had just dramatically kicked down a door and scrambled into the room. What the fuck . “No,” I said flatly, and didn’t add that SecUnits don’t have parents in the first place. I’d learnt by now that making general comments about how/why SecUnits are made still makes humans upset, even after years of knowing me.
“Mh. Ok. Sorry. Let me rephrase. Seth and I understand ourselves as your extended family because of how you’re interlinked with our family network.”
My expression was still doubtful, but this made a little more sense. My favorite human’s child was married to their child, after all.
“Because of how families are structured, and because we understand ourselves as fathers to Peri, this kind of puts you in a ‘child’ position too.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Of course not. Neither is Peri. But we care for Peri in that way, so we care about you in that way too.”
I was lost, I will admit. What did ART and I have to do with all of this? “So you’re assuming authority over me?”
Martyn sighed, and aborted a motion to put his hand over his face. “No. No, but the joke plays with that. Basically, when someone meets their partner’s parents, who by extension are their parents too, they’re going to want to impress them, so the person behaves differently.
ART said, He is saying that- ,
Shut up, you’re making this headache worse.
I purposefully did not turn to glare at Martyn. “I don’t get it.”
He squinted, I could hear it in his voice. “I’m sure Peri can explain it better than me.” Simultaneously, ART was sending me a massive educational file on family relations and cultural habits in Mihira and New Tideland, with a side supply of Preservation traditions.
“Anyway, the joke was that Seth thought you were trying to impress us.”
“I think I’ve done enough of that already,” I said, loudly ignoring ART scrambling through my mind. (Honestly, the most amusing part of this was how embarrassed it was at this whole conversation.)
That made him laugh. Whew. Situation solved. “You have! And don’t worry about it. Sorry for confusing you with the joke, wasn’t my intention. Enjoying the party otherwise?”
“I hope it’s over soon.”
ART, in my head, was doing the equivalent of throwing things at the wall like an angry media human. My left eye blinked a few times from the weird sensation.
Martyn laughed again. “I see. Well, I’ll leave you two to it.” He slapped his hands on his thighs and then got up, joints creaking. I stared at the wall for a while after that, giving ART time to collect its shit.
How drunk was he? I asked it eventually.
Very. Stars. I’m sorry.
I didn’t understand what for, but this entire cycle had been emotionally illogical for ART anyway.
-
Towards the end of the event, I almost had an actual fight with ART. Almost because our proper fights were with higher stakes involved, and this was not a life or death situation. It was a I’m not going to leave you alone to suffer situation, and ART wasn’t used to being the one who suffered.
It’s a tradition, was the weak excuse it kept repeating. With every repeat, it sounded more upset, and I really had no idea if I was doing the right thing. There was no inner Bharadwaj-voice to tell me how to handle this.
Almost all of the guests had filtered out by now. ART was docked, and most of them had permanent or semi-permanent lodgings on the station. The only one who was going to sleep on the ship was the former captain, for a final time. That was the tradition, and that was the whole problem.
“I don’t care,” I said, and I was saying it aloud because I had waved goodbye at those who were leaving and retreated to my cabin already.
ART wobbled at me. You have to leave. It had said that three times by now, and I was starting to think it really wanted me to. Every single organic bit of me resisted that thought. You cannot stay. You are not supposed to stay.
ART tried to sound threatening, but it sounded more like a scared mini-human. For someone of its size, it had no reason to sound this small. I couldn’t even hold it.
“ART,” I whispered, trying to sound reasonable and soothing, and failing, because emotions. “Human traditions don’t apply to us.”
They might not apply to you, SecUnit, for some reason that stung, but they apply to me.
There was a difference between rules and traditions to ART that I didn’t see. For me they were pretty much alike. ART had no issue breaking rules. In hindsight, I realize these two are not the same, but that didn’t occur to me in the moment.
“No one is going to know that I’m still here.” I had officially left already, and I was in my cabin, where no one would look anyway. Especially not Seth on his customary last walk through the decks. (It all sounded so final, these traditions, as if someone had died. Leave it to humans to make things worse than they have to be.)
I will. Seth will. Right, because Seth was going to do a final check of all its stats. Well.
“You can keep me hidden.”
I don’t want to.
That made me pause. “Why not?”
Because this tradition is not about you.
I understood that. I technically had no business or reason to interfere. But ART had been having multiple mini-breakdowns for several hours now, spiraling into a grieving abyss and immediately being thrown back into joy, or hysteria, and then into embarrassment, and I couldn’t do anything to help. “You’re upset, and I don’t want to leave you alone like this.”
It’s not about what you want.
I looked at the wall. I rolled back the entire conversation again. It took me two minutes to process what my organics were yelling at me and to make it make sense with what ART kept telling me.
“I’m sorry,” I said eventually. ART pinged me. “Are you sure you will be okay?”
Seth will be there.
I nodded. I left taking an unused corridor, not wanting to bump into anyone. On the way I asked, “Should I disconnect from our cameras too?”
Yes, please.
I didn’t like it, but after the airlock cycled shut behind me, I slipped out of ART’s camera inputs. I wandered into an area of the station that had no humans around, not even ambient light to attract any, and waited. After 10 hours, ART pinged me. Later it even offered me an emotional read-out, though it was reluctant to do so. I didn’t take it up on the offer. ART had its right to privacy, too.
....- -.-- . .- .-. ... -... . ..-. --- .-. . .. .... .- -.. -- -.-- -.. ..- -- -... .. -.. . .-
Three
I would like to apologize for my words earlier. They were unkind, the Fengári said suddenly, breaking their 26 hour silent treatment. Through my drone I could see my face make an unnecessary movement by lifting my eyebrow. Fen wasn’t in the drone, so it was a movement just for me.
Why? You weren’t wrong. I was placing expectations on you that I had no right to. I pulled up Fen’s location data. Shouldn’t you have already left the system? They were holding their position just short of the pulling distance of the main wormhole that left the Pansystem.
Yes, but I couldn’t leave the conversation as it was. Who knows when we’ll be in range again, and I had to apologize. You’ve been a good crew member, despite our…issues. Fen would pause for intentional effect, unlike their sibling Perihelion who liked to talk fast to remind people how smart it was. And, while I won’t take back the meaning of what I said, I didn’t have to be as mean as I was. You were trying to reach for something more, and I was more than rude in how I turned you down.
My head thunked against the wall of the transit ring. I was currently sitting on a bench waiting for a transport to take me back to Preservation. I was supposed to be aboard Fen, with their crew, to go on a diplomatic mission to a different system. Instead, I was here, having broken my contract six hours before we were scheduled to leave. There was some guilt, since they had had to find new security and delayed the mission by an additional 6 hours, but I would have been incredibly ineffective as security when I was having a spat with the ship.
Well, I didn’t make it easy. I’m sorry for that, I said.
32.5 hours ago Fen and I had had an argument so loud three separate University bots sent us requests to reduce our feed activity. It was entirely my fault, and the residual shame resulted in a 4% performance reliability drop.
I'm sorry I pushed you- I said, at the same time Fen said, Are we still friends?
I had to stop and think about that. I liked Fen, and recently I had begun to develop deeper feelings I hadn't anticipated (ones I hadn't been sure I was capable of having). But Fen didn't, and Fen wouldn't, considering they were aromantic. I hadn't realized this when I told them how I felt, but in hindsight, I probably should have. All the signs were there, but I had selectively ignored them. Fen had thought I had known. The resulting “conversation” didn’t go well.
I don’t know, I said, and it was the truth. My instincts and risk assessment module told me Fen and I could probably get through this, but threat assessment wanted to burn this bridge and never come back, lest we suffer more emotional distress. “I don’t know” was the compromise.
I see. Fen sounded legitimately sad, which made my already simmering guilt burn anew.
I have to go now, Three. But I'll… see you around sometime?
I wanted to curl up and put my face in my knees, the way 1.0 did and never seemed to feel any shame about doing. But this transit ring was semi-busy, and it still made people nervous sometimes to have a rogue SecUnit wandering around, no matter how long I had worked here, so I couldn’t act weird.
Yeah, see you around, Fen.
They pinged me with an affirmative, an unusually nonverbal response for them, and I watched as their location data disappeared as they entered the wormhole.
I could put my face in my hand, maybe that wouldn’t look as strange as curling up.
I remained like that for four more hours until my transport for Preservation arrived. Maybe it was finally time to talk to Dr. Bharadwaj.
..--- -.-- . .- .-. ... -... . ..-. --- .-. . .. .... .- -.. -- -.-- -.. ..- -- -... .. -.. . .-
SecUnits were not made for peace. I noticed that sometime in one of those in-between moments, when I wasn’t on a mission with ART, or protecting my humans from being eaten or shot at. We get nervous when nothing is happening. You’d think that after a lifespan of being a SecUnit wired for paranoia and anxiety I’d know that.
Maybe I was a bit like ART in that sense, when on cargo runs.
Or maybe I was only drawing that comparison because I was miffed by the tiny insect bites I had all along my left upper arm, which were itching terribly. I wasn’t actually brain-numbingly bored. I was sitting in the shade on the edge of the terrace belonging to the large, spread-out flat building that constituted the main area of the Mensah family farm. The Mensah family humans, all with their client tag to tell my brain that this totally was a security mission, were in various spots within my sight, lazing about in the sun, or in the shade like me.
Despite the fact that nobody was talking, it wasn’t quiet. There was a constant buzz and droning from various insects, and the odd chirping of some birds.
It wasn’t annoying. The buzzing almost sounded like the constant hum of engine and circuitry on a station or ship, and while I found that much more comforting than living insects trying to eat me (in a small, non-lethal way that didn’t warrant weapons), this whole farm thing wasn’t awful.
Don’t tell anyone I even thought that. I had committed to the grumpy “I hate planets” bit for too long now to say that “oh well maybe if all my humans are in one spot just chilling it’s not so bad.”
I was aware that I wasn’t made for this environment. Time passed very slowly, in a heat-filled haze in which I truly, genuinely had nothing to do but watch serials, read, whatever.
Everytime I glanced at one of my humans, they’d have shifted position. There was no HubSystem on this farm (there was hardly a feed), but I was very convinced nobody exhibited signs of distress. There is a particular way humans move when they’re sleepy, lazy, not in immediate danger and not recovering from injury that I don’t get to see very often.
I got used to the peace once I accepted that there was no other shoe that had to drop just because I was here.
My existence in a space didn’t automatically cause havoc, terror, or hostiles to show up and try shoot shit.
I know, it feels weird for me too.
Under a tree, of the sort with the big flat leaves, Farai was in the process of falling asleep. Dr. Mensah was too caught up in the word puzzle she was solving to notice, but once Farai started snoring softly she glanced at her for almost a minute with a smile that would have melted my organics by proxy if it wasn’t already very warm here.
Humans in this family were excellent at giving each other these kinds of looks, or even just when talking about other family members. You could get most of the adult humans to melt into that smile by mentioning the recent addition to the family.
I was scheduled to be here for four cycles. It was now cycle two. On cycle one, I had asked Mensah why Amena, Iris, and their mini human weren’t here too. “Because toddlers don’t do well with the heat,” she had said, as if that was supposed to make sense. I don’t think that was all there was to that, and I squinted at Mensah to indicate confusion. She didn’t explain it any further, almost as if I’d have to ask if I wanted to know something personal. But apparently that was also why Tano wasn’t here. Don’t ask me to explain how large family collectives work.
I didn’t have much to do here, and nobody forced me to show up either. This wasn’t any kind of celebration I had to attend to make my humans happy. I got invited to come planetside when I logged my presence at Preservation Station, and for a reason I didn’t know I’d accepted. If Mensah was startled by this she hid it well.
Maybe I enjoyed getting to fluster others for once rather than being the one flustered by social situations.
Or maybe, maybe I didn’t need reasons to do things.
As the afternoon progressed, the main sun became less aggressive in its desire to boil everyone alive, causing some of the younger humans to get more active again. (I couldn’t in accurately call them small humans anymore, even the one that was very small when I first met them was in that blurry line between adolescent and adult now. Perhaps the new mini human would eventually be down to shenaniganry again. I missed when most of the young humans would do things just for shits and giggles, even if those were sometimes a little dangerous.)
The sky darkened with nightfall eventually, after a spectacular sunset that I saved to my archives. I stayed outside the whole night, looking at the stars.
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I winced as a pincer pulled another piece of half-molten metal out of my face. Even with my pain sensors all the way down, faces are so full of nerves that having anything happening to them was irritating. I couldn’t talk out loud right then, because I had been unlucky enough to end up having to use my face as a shield for some human I had met exactly six minutes before. But their skin wasn’t poked through with metal, and my skull’s internal plating was holding up perfectly, so really things were fine.
Beside me, in the other medbay cradle, Three was lying sideways on the platform, facing me. (Whyever the hell it needed to do that.) Its face wasn’t as fucked up as mine, which meant it moved well, and I could see all the discomfort it was feeling displayed neatly between its eyebrows and around its mouth. In our shared feed, ART kept an open tab on our pain levels. It had tried to convince us into shutdown for the repair cycle, but Three and I both refused. We weren’t that hurt, and we had things to discuss. In the feed, we currently had twelve different clips open, comparing our various drone and camera inputs from the previous situation, matching our data to evaluate.
Ignoring the mechanical arm currently repositioning its leg in order to get the hip back to how it was supposed to work, Three said, “If you had adjusted your pivot angle by four degrees you could have evaded that.” It highlighted a few seconds on several clips of me dodging a projectile weapon and almost succeeding. With Three’s extra input, I could see that too. Without its additional eyes, I hadn’t. I adjusted an algorithm and dismissed the tagged clips. Three exhaled loudly through its nose and there was a faint click . Its performance reliability, visible in the shared feed, dipped but climbed immediately after.
My turn. Through the feed, because my jaw wasn’t working, I said, I think these walls used an alloy coating specific to the Tagvas system. I highlighted the moment when Three had taken four energy shots to open an exit large enough for it and the humans to enter through. Might have needed higher intensity .
Accompanying me, ART sent the chemical analysis of the alloy, and a diagram of the wall’s makeup. Three, likely, adjusted its databases.
Evaluating the fight had become a habit, if we had been in one together. To Three, doing that came kind of naturally, this helpful back and forth of sharing analysis and intel and suggestions for improvement. I was more used to sharing results and important losses after an altercation, nothing more, and it had taken some time for me to get used to this. Initially, it had made me feel like Three was trying to tell me how to do my job, and pissed me off. By now I knew how helpful it was.
Three edited a still it took from one of its drones and zoomed into my face mid-motion. (Before the shrapnel had turned me into a planetside craterscape.) It was blurry and frankly ridiculous, no matter how little I liked looking at my face. ART said, Oh I’m keeping this. Three added, out loud, “This is a ‘tired of your human bullshit’ kind of face.”
I was able to counter that. In between the chaos of discovering a group of humans in distress caused by another group of humans, trying to help the first set of humans while both groups of humans realize you’re a pair of SecUnits, there were a lot of funny faces.
We could evaluate the funny face ratio because there had not been a single casualty. Sure, this whole thing had gone a little sideways, with way more shooting and destruction than necessary, and definitely some broken bones, but only to the shitty humans who deserved them. (And us, but we could get fixed up by ART while talking strategy.) There had been one short moment where a smaller human had watched a blast go off right behind us. I’d grabbed them and vaulted away, putting them down in a corner while already deploying drones to take care of the idiot who had shot at me. The small human had made the most delightful expression, apparently unaware of the danger they were in, and mostly just looked impressed. Awed, maybe. I sent a zoom-still of that right back at Three.
Some warm emotion prickled through the feed from ART. The set of pincers and grabbers working on my face patted my cheek in mock-condescension a second later, pulling some fast-repair foil over my skin. It tickled, and a small timer popped up in the feed, telling me how long I’d have to endure that before my face was functional again.
Before Three could return to proper analysis (I was sure it wasn’t done yet, it usually found about ten to fifteen things to criticize or comment on), ART pushed a stupidly massive edited clip at us. Sometimes I thought about how unfair it was that ART could be doing battle tactics, repair on two SecUnits, self-navigation and helping the two small refugee ships find their way to the best nearest wormhole, and still be editing stupidly impressive fight compilations just for amusement’s sake all at the same time. (Of course it could be doing many things more all the same, but in moments like these I remembered just how big ART was, how powerful. That wasn’t a bad thing to remember, sometimes.)
I let the high-resolution edit wash over me. I could barely stand those, never sure how to react to the way ART staged my presence. This one was relatively short and fast-paced (as had been the actual incident), and pretty heroic. ART called them “fancams” jokingly, a word it had stolen from Iris years ago. Three was delighted, and distracted enough by the edit to ignore that ART started fixing up its larger leg wound.
I replayed the edit, with audio off (ART’s choice of music never matched my preferences anyway), looking for something. I wondered if ART had noticed.
If it had, it didn’t include it in the edit.
ART removed the healing foil from my face and I sighed in relief. I worked my jaw a few times, and said, “Fuck” out loud. Yep, speech facility all back to functional.
“Glad to hear it,” Three replied, a bit strained.
ART’s medbay reached for my torso and pushed me flat on my back. ART pinged me apologetically as my performance reliability dropped by two percent from the discomfort. I pinged it back to reassure it that I was fine, and that I’d have shut down already if this was all as catastrophic as the stats made it out to be.
For the next thirty seconds, as ART worked through the truly bad parts (you know, stripping off useless flesh, disinfecting, setting bones or telling them where to grow again, encouraging flesh to grow back also, all that annoying stuff), we both stopped conversing or analyzing or anything. Instead, for distraction, ART informed us of where the two human ships had gone.
The situation we had crashed into had consisted of an absolute clusterfuck of human stupidity. Sometimes, when you take down a shitty corporation, you find a vein of secret refugee trafficking or whatever you want to call it. Humans find ways to escape indentured servitude, sometimes, sometimes even directly under their rich supervisor’s snotty nose. They lead to other companies, or to groups who help them actually flee, like what Lutran had been involved in. It was hard to tell which was a trap and which wasn’t, and even harder to decide how to interfere. Or if, at all.
In this case, the shitty supervisor had just discovered the well-established secret route to safety, and was in the process of eliminating it. ART had been aware of several mining moons in the system, but the distress call was a surprise still. The decision to come and help had been no decision at all. Receiving a distress call from a mine turned my brain into white-hot urgency, and neither Three nor ART argued against me.
The distress call had been peculiar. Formatted in an almost familiar way. The situation had included no other SecUnits, just us. If that mining installation had used SecUnits or not I had no idea, we didn’t stay to find out. There had been no hint of my former company anywhere. When I found the human who had launched the distress signal, I half expected her to be familiar somehow, someone I’d met before. I hadn’t. It was odd.
ART made sure that the escaped humans found their way safely, sending stabilization vectors to the bot pilot and the augmented human pilot. It had identified itself as who it was, offering them the route to Mihira, but they’d declined, and not told ART where they were headed. That was fair, and ART understood. If we didn’t know where they went, we couldn’t accidentally betray them - sometimes paranoia serves you well. While some of them were hurt, they weren’t hurt badly enough to endanger their survivability for the journey’s duration. ART also made sure the shitty humans back on the moon couldn’t follow the refugees, frying their scanners and comm devices just badly enough to lose track of them. Not that they were fit to travel. Before they’d go anywhere, they’d need to get their several broken bones fixed.
We were allowed to gloat a little bit, I thought.
Maybe ART thought we were gloating too much, so it decided to return to bickering.
Did that situation really warrant two fully armed SecUnits to intervene?
A rather stupid point to make, in my opinion, but I was busy clenching my teeth against the sting of the medbay opening up the edges of a energy-blast-cauterized wound.
Three said, “Not really? Maybe just one of us could have managed.”
This was not a productive line of thought, and uncommon for ART, who tended not to dwell on would-have-could-have scenarios.
Maybe if it had only been one of you, you wouldn’t have allowed yourselves to get beaten to shit like this.
We both made the same offended noise at that. Three lifted its arm, the good one that still had a functioning gun. “We didn’t! Look, Peri, I only lost six percent of my organic body mass today.”
I wheezed, not only because of the pain in my chest. One of the medical arms raised from my torso and pointed an accusing, fluid smeared pincer at Three. Yes, but only because Murderbot over here lost an additional ten percent for you.
“Hey-,” I objected to the use of my name, but then again Three had known my name before ART did. “Also that’s not true. We were covering for each other.”
To prove my point, Three jumped right in with video footage. There Three was, having just shoved the last teary-eyed but being very brave about it human through the escape hole in the wall, receiving the ping that I would give the humans 28 seconds time to run before following. There were only five hostiles left (sure, some had annoying power armor, but at this point humans in power armor simply were no match for me anymore unless I was seriously damaged), and I’d knock them out while Three shepherded the humans away. And yeah, okay, I took some hits I could have prevented there, but my goal was to make sure none of the hostiles got a shot at the refugees, so maybe I used myself as a shield a bit more than usual. But it was for a reason . (Also, I was trying not to kill the hostiles, and sometimes you take an extra hit or two for that. It’s worth it.)
And on the clip, it looked pretty damn cool, too. Why hadn’t ART taken that bit for its weird “fancam” edit?
I shifted on the medical platform. “If it wasn’t for Three, I’d have lost more than ten percent of my body mass.” After a moment I added, “And vice versa, I guess.”
I skipped through more of that clip, through disabling the hostiles and dipping into the tunnel behind Three. By then, Three had picked up the small human, the one who had stared at me. They were still staring at me, holding on to Three’s shoulder like Three meant everything.
Their mouth shaped words, but Three recorded no audio from them.
In the feed, ART frowned, but simultaneously it retreated from the procedure on my chest and from Three’s bad leg. My pain levels were bearable, and my other stats stable. ART was unhappy with our strategy, which was nitpicky of it in my opinion, but I understood its concern. I’d tell it I didn’t mean to worry it, that I couldn’t even imagine what it would feel like to have to fix it so often after a fight. (Fixing its hull that one time had been scary enough, and I was glad it hadn’t happened since.)
A different tactic was needed. I nudged ART in the feed to draw its attention away from SecUnit-typical self-sacrificial behavior, because it really didn’t need to ruin the good mood. “Remember that malware we coded for the last intel mission?”
Of course I do, it said immediately, taking the bait. Thank fuck. You employed it today and it worked.
“Of course it did,” I echoed in ART’s haughty tone. “Worked great.”
“You know, SecUnit” Three said, echoing the tone even better than me, which definitely didn’t annoy me, “I think ART doesn’t want to admit it likes when we go on spontaneous uncrewed missions together to fuck shit up because it doesn’t want to admit it likes using us for warfare experiments.”
I am not using you for–
“Point,” Three said.
“Taken,” I said.
ART clutched its function dramatically, mimicking the sound a human makes when about to launch into a long explanatory tirade by opening a vent nearby and sucking in air. I pinged it, out of habit, just to make sure it wasn’t actually upset, and it pinged me back so smugly it almost made me laugh. Some emotion was in the feed, and I had no idea if it was mine or ART’s or Three’s.
A second later I yelped and swatted at the mechanical arm that just used a bit more force than it needed to remove a temporary healing pad from my shoulder. “Ow!” Yes, I was overdoing my reactions on purpose too, but it was funny.
Apologies , ART drawled, Would you like me to use my newest experimental painkiller on you?
Three sat up abruptly and barked a laugh. I had no good comeback so I said, “Idiot.”
No, that’s your title.
“Incorrect, Perihelion, ” Three said. “If I recall correctly you call SecUnit ‘little idiot’ actually.”
My face did about ten things at once and ART made a noise over the feed that sounded like a digital version of its hull shuddering with laughter. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to jump off the platform and leave, point a rude gesture at Three, or hiss at ART to shut up. Distraction had worked a moment ago. I frantically searched through the altercation footage for something else that I hadn’t brought up yet but marked for later review. Tagging the entire clip as important for maximum distraction value, I shoved some footage into the workspace. “Did you notice that logo by the way?” So smooth, Murderbot.
Three gave me a look that would have gone right through any opaqued visor, and thus went right through my flimsy poker face as well, but decided to indulge me. “That’s the organization fronting for our next target.”
Our next target, in our long-term planning of taking down the Corporation Rim one shitty corporation at a time whenever the opportunity arose, was a relatively young minicorp hiding behind a tech distributor, forwarding agency of some sort. We didn’t know much yet. Curious, however, that this shitty mining moon was in contact with them.
“Makes me wonder if tech isn’t the only thing they’re forwarding.”
Three nodded in agreement.
At the same time, ART said to me, privately, Three is right. You are indeed my little idiot.
I punched the medbay platform below me and made another face. In the stupid, traiterous shared feed that we used to monitor our repair status, a notification about increased body temperature popped up.
Three didn’t turn its head to look at me, but I saw the stupid grin that curled over its face.
“Whatever you think just happened,” I said, “You’re wrong.”
Three hummed. “So, that organization. HermTrail, was it? You think they traffic humans?”
“Maybe. There was a refugee road right under their noses, which might have been one of their usual traffic roads, just taken over by someone who was actually trying to help.”
That seems like a plausible theory, ART said. According to current travel calculations, we have enough time to adjust our course and gather more information to prove or negate that theory before our next scheduled mission stop.
We began gathering what we knew from the feed downloads and research ART had conducted on this topic already, and tying it into our new theory.
-
Three sat up slowly. It had sat up earlier, out of agitation, but needed to lean back again, probably dizzy. Now it swung its legs over the side of the medical table and carefully, mechanically stretched its back and arms. Then it pulled its arms in front of itself and opened both gunports a few times. My own arms were itching to do the same, but something caught my attention. Three’s gunports moved oddly, wobbling with the motion, as if unstable, or organic where they should be inorganic. Alien, in a way.
Then I recalled the modifications ART and Three had been working on, something about including parts of the synthetics weapons we had run into a few times. I hadn’t paid much attention to them yet.
ART, also watching Three flex its arms, said, Do you like the current configuration?
Three stared at its left arm. I had seen its gunports in many states by now, shifting through all sorts of weapons almost constantly. “I’m still getting used to it,” it said carefully. The port shifted open again, jittery almost, structures warping into shape. It made me feel squeasy.
“You’re going to have to uninstall that before we return to the Pansystem,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. This wasn’t legal in Mihira or New Tideland. From the way ART weighed down on me in the feed, it knew, but had written itself a little permit and was gleefully committing crime. Not that I minded.
We will. But that does not answer the question. Three?
Three shrugged. “Better than projectiles. I don’t fully… trust these yet.” A moment of tense silence, in which I raised both eyebrows so high Mensah would have been proud of me, before Three added, “Not that I don’t trust myself with them in a fight, obviously. They work perfectly. But they also unsettle me a little.”
There was no way ART had installed potentially dangerous weapons on Three, so I batted my suddenly spiking threat assessment down. I clicked my own gunports open and closed. I never really changed my weapons unless they were supremely damaged and needed to be replaced, which ART took as an excuse for an upgrade. I didn’t actively discuss upgrades with ART the way Three did, and wasn’t interested in changing my configuration up every so often. Upgrades were nice, and I never missed my previous installations.
Three, meanwhile, seemed to never be satisfied with what it got.
Let me know if you want any further adjustments. I’ve run all data from the fight through and updated some of the mechanics, if you want to have a look. A file was pushed into the feed, and Three pulled it close for examination. I didn’t look too closely, because if I did ART would ask me if I was interested, and I didn’t want to think about that right now. There was something here, illustrated in the difference between Three and me and the respective relations we had to our configurations. I could look at that later, when I wasn’t in pain.
Or still thinking about that small human and the face they had made. The words their mouth had shaped.
“It’s you.”
Whatever that meant.
It had been aimed at me. “ It’s you.”
Where did that kid know me from?
ART pinged me again. I had missed a whole two pings from it.
I take it you are not interested in an upgrade , ART said, not even pretending to be offended. My torso was still partially a black hole, so I pointed at that. “Essentials first.”
I got another ping, gentler this time, and a request for a diagnostic which I followed up on immediately. If ART picked up on my confusion, it didn’t comment. I didn’t try to keep it hidden because that would draw ART’s attention even more. Having the diagnostic pulled from me felt strangely soothing, familiar in its intent and function. My jaw relaxed a little bit, which I hadn’t noticed clenching before.
I fiddled with my gunports a bit more, while the repair continued and Three eventually picked up the evaluation process again. Two more times the repair situation became uncomfortable enough that we had to drop the conversation, time which ART used to update us on the refugee’s shuttle trajectories. They were doing alright.
The second time, I asked ART privately, Have we ever met these people before?
No, ART replied immediately, Not one human there matches with any profiles in our databases.
My head hurt a little in the way it does when something really makes no sense. Usually I would have ascribed a human recognizing me but not the other way around to my having met them previously and then deleted the files, or the meeting having happened before a memory wipe. I hadn’t been memory wiped in two decades. And this human in particular was way too young for that anyway.
However, ART said slowly, with hesitating tension in its voice that made my organics prickle. Their distress call used familiar code.
Maybe ART noticed how eerie I found this, because it increased its feed pressure on me as it sent the call data the humans had projected into the void. (Had they any idea how fucking lucky they were that we had been around to hear?)
I looked at the code, and recognition hit me in the face harder than any of the gunshots during the altercation had.
How did they even-, I struggled to form words even in the fastness of the feed. That’s not how that file was supposed to be used.
ART curled up closer, as if it was patting my shoulder. It almost felt condescending. Almost. I looked at the mangled, repurposed and thrice-overwritten version of the HelpMe.file .
When Bharadwaj had released her documentary into the wild, she had hoped that the secret messages interwoven in the metadata would make their way to any construct who might be watching, over a supervisor’s shoulder, monitoring the downloading streams of a mining installation, or just from noise in the background. There were multiple ways to decode the essentials of the HelpMe.file from watching the documentary, or even just processing its download details. The file wasn’t supposed to be findable for humans. Humans were not supposed to know how it works, hacking your governor module.
I felt hot and cold at the same time as my organics began sweating stupidly.
Humans were not supposed to mangle the code badly enough to use it as the base for a distress call, that made no fucking sense whatsoever, humans have their own kinds of distress calls don’t they?
Calm down, ART said into my accelerating thought spiral.
Tell me why this is not a reason to panic, I hissed back, and by now Three was definitely suspicious of what was going on between us judging from the quizzical look on its face.
I didn’t say it wasn’t a reason to panic. However, I ask you to take a closer look. The hacking instructions were not messed with. Yes, they were isolated from the rest of the files, which indicates these refugees figured out that the documentary, or whatever media this was encrypted in, was a tool to free constructs. But the instructions themselves are intact, and underlying the distress call.
But then they fucked up. I didn’t notice them when we received the call, so that plan wouldn’t have worked. (The plan, I assumed, had been to send the distress call with the hacking instructions, in case a random enslaved construct came by, heard the plea for help, and decided to hack itself just to run to the rescue. An entirely insane and stupid plan, I thought, but one that would have worked in case the construct in question was anything like Three. Or me. Maybe. Not the point. This gave me multiple emotions.)
I agree, they fucked up a little. But this is not an attempt to undermine the function of the file. It’s possible these humans got the metadata from somewhere else, without knowing what they were doing. This is all, of course, speculation.
Are you going to follow up on it?
ART deflated a little. If our goal is to keep these refugees safe, then I can’t. I’m going to delete all traces of their ships once they’ve entered the wormhole, and following them for more research might make their escape route more vulnerable.
I nodded. But this way we know that something made it out there.
Certainly. In addition, I will keep my sensors peeled for anything similar to this.
I nodded again, and thought about the small human again.
“It’s you.”
The little hairs on my skin raised. I think they actually saw Bharadwaj’s documentary.
How come?
I shook my head, not sure how to explain to ART what I was thinking without opening a whole can of issues. Just a feeling.
ART pinged me with a ping that couldn’t have been more sarcastic, but didn’t pry further.
Bharadwaj’s documentary had not once shown my face. The way this child had clung to Three, so sure that they would be safe now, and not at all afraid, looking at me like I was some–
I wished I had a good excuse to initiate a shutdown to deal with these emotions, but ART was basically done with my repairs by now, and Three was giving me such a suspicious look that shutting down now would lead it to a bazillion wrong conclusions.
“Everything alright?” Three asked, somewhere between worry and amused. “Shall I give you some privacy?”
I almost sputtered, but managed to say, “No. We’re fine.”
“If you say so.” Three smiled its little mischievous smile now, and if I had anything at hand that wasn’t my dented drone I’d have thrown it at Three.
The refugee ships are entering the wormhole in 209 seconds, interjected ART, with an obnoxious customer-service robot voice. I’ve added our mission parameters to include more research on refugee networks spanning the Tagvas system.
As it said that, our priority list in the feed shuffled and rearranged itself, with new calculations projecting our next detour.
Reparations concluded eventually, and so did combat analysis. The small human’s expression however did not leave my mind, and I resolved to talk to Three about it later.
My face had not been shown in the documentary. Still, the human had recognized me. Who was I to this human? To anyone who had seen the documentary? To the constructs maybe freed by the HelpMe.file ? My mind felt haunted by these questions I hadn’t thought about before.
But maybe it was time to start thinking about them.
..--- -.-. -.-- -.-. .-.. . ... -... . ..-. --- .-. . .. ... .... .- .-. . -.. -- -.-- --. .-. . .- - .. -.. . .-
ART’s distress signal wasn’t exactly a proper distress signal, it had actually been a low-priority request for assistance with the particular task it needed help with marked as unspecified. Considering we were 12 days into the 19 day wormhole journey back to Preservation, this was scary as all shit for about .45 seconds. ART didn’t send random, low-priority requests. If the needed action was low enough it would just take care of whatever it was itself, and it was never so vague. So, as far as threat assessment was concerned, it was a distress signal.
“What the shit?” I said out loud, pausing the episode of Zombies Bring People Together that we were watching. I had only about 56% of its attention right now, but that was about the same as what I had had before it sent me the assistance request.
Apologies, it said, sounding the bot-equivalent of sheepish of all things, I probably should have submitted that differently. I didn’t mean to worry you.
I rolled my eyes, already flipping through the cameras.
“What do you need?”
It pulled up the view from one of its own drones. Ah.
Squatting in one of the hallways in the unsteady way of a very small human, large paint pen grasped in one hand, Mini was diligently coloring on ART’s bulkhead. In fact, it seemed Mini had been at this for a while, and the entire span of wall for at least a meter and what I’d suspect was as high as it could reach had been turned from ART’s very pristine shade of white to a wild assortment of primary colors and color swatching.
Mini had a special interest in color theory, and understanding how colors mixed. It seemed ART was its latest canvas. There were three drones watching it, all of them maintenance drones armed with solvent and various cleaning implements.
I stared ART down in the feed, and pulled up the cameras for the main bridge, but they were turned off.
Iris and Amena are otherwise occupied, and I didn’t want to disturb them, it said by way of explanation.
Ew.
“Then why couldn’t you tell it to stop?”
ART did the feed equivalent of looking away guiltily. I raised my eyebrow at the nearest camera.
“Fine, ART, I’ll be the big bad SecUnit and tell Mini to stop.”
Its relief was practically palpable. Thank you.
Mini wasn’t actually very far from my own quarters, and it was now very diligently making a color wheel on a new stretch of wall.
“Mini.”
It looked at my hands, which were in ready position at my sides and about the same height as Mini. I pointed at the wall. “Is Peri’s wall your canvas?” Mini seemed to contemplate lying, before shaking its head. (The many sparkly ribbons in its hair keeping its two poofy buns in place were hanging on for dear life, I noted, and would need to be fixed or Mini would be upset if the ends touched its neck. Iris and Amena frequently struggled to find ways to actually keep a rambunctious four year old’s hair in place while also satisfying Mini’s desire to be covered in sparkly things head-to-toe at all times.)
I pointed to Mini’s hands, and looked down at the paint pens. “Then why are you using canvas only tools on a non canvas surface?” Mini did not respond. “Did you ask Peri for permission before you started to paint on it?” Mini shook its head again.
“Then perhaps you should ask it,” I said as one of ART’s drones placed itself between Mini and my hands (Mini didn’t like eye contact, and preferred to watch people’s hands to communicate with them. This suited me just fine, but ART didn’t have hands, and Mini was too young for a feed device, so they primarily communicated with each other using drones.)
“Peri?”
Yes, Mini?
Mini pointed to ART’s bulkhead, and pointed at the wall. “Can I- can I play here?”
Yes you may, Mini. If you help me clean up afterwards. Can you help me clean up once you are done playing?
Mini nodded at the drone and smiled.
Then you may continue, ART said. (So much for me being the big bad SecUnit so ART could clean its walls. What a sucker.)
Mini went right back to painting, and completed the outline for the color wheel. It finished three entire color wheels and a shaded sphere that showed how cyan and magenta made blue before Iris and Amena finally found us and put a stop to the wall art. I wasn’t sure who was more disappointed; Mini or ART.
“Sorry, Peri, we didn’t realize it would do this. Mini, did Peri say this was ok?” Iris asked, fluttering on the edge of scooping Mini up and away from ART’s bulkhead while also wanting to respect her child’s desire to not be touched as much as Iris would probably like.
Mini nodded, its hand twitching in a way I knew meant it really wanted to start painting again.
I gave it permission to paint. And in the future, you will ask for permission first , right Mini? ART said. Mini nodded and made an affirmative noise. It seemed genuinely upset they were going to make it clean up the wall, and ART had already offered to just clean up by itself, but Amena and Iris insisted Mini had to learn how to clean up after itself.
They didn’t force me to do any cleaning, thankfully.
Shortly after, once the bulk of the impromptu mural was removed from ART’s wall, and Mini was relocated to a nearby table that was specifically sized for it to be able to sit comfortably at and continue making artwork, Amena approached me.
“So, do you care to explain what this big secret plan you've been working on with ART is?” She said, I raised my eyebrow at the top of her head (I liked that the top of Amena’s head was perfectly eye level for me. It made not making eye contact even easier than normal.)
“Who said there was a secret plan?” I asked. Amena rolled her eyes at me, as her gaze shifted to watch Iris coloring in a children’s art book next to Mini. She looked content, and I decided I didn’t need to pay much attention to her expression.
“I’ve known you forever, SecUnit, I can tell when you’re up to something. At least I can most of the time, anyway. Iris can too. Does it have something to do with the meeting on our itinerary for the day after we arrive back at Preservation? You know, the meeting Iris and I definitely didn’t put on there?” she said. I might’ve made an amused expression at that; Amena was one of the smarter humans I knew. I liked that about her.
“It does. But I’m not saying what. You’ll have to wait and see.” I tried to contort my face into what I was hoping was a coy smile, and mostly succeeded. The camera view of myself was slightly terrifying. But Amena understood what I was trying to do, and huffed a laugh before joining Iris and Mini at the table to watch what they were doing.
Our humans are too clever, ART said, leaning on me in the feed for no apparent reason. It said this fondly, since we both preferred when our humans were clever.
They are. It's why we chose them for our mission, I responded. As I spoke, it pulled back up our presentation and fretted with it some more, so I pushed myself partially into its systems and batted the presentation away from its attention. Stop it. It's as good as we can make it.
To its credit, ART put the presentation away before it scooped me up and pushed me back out of its systems. Fine, yes you’re correct. I just worry.
You always do.
And I always will. You’re hardly better.
True. ART did the feed equivalent of laughing, and I felt a smile on my face.
I felt pretty good about the future. How nice.
Notes:
Did you know that we’ve been gifted with fanart?! Check it out, it’s amazing!!
https://andy-allan-poe.tumblr.com/post/689821035871272960/inspired-by-the-lovely-fanfic-variableaffection
..and…
https://lemongrassi.tumblr.com/post/692793841469800448/akejsjsjdha-this-is-a-really-good-fic
Thank you SO MUCH for your support and for the incredible joy you’ve brought us with your art! Receiving fanart for your story is such an honour!And of course, because we can’t live without it - the meme, roasting ourselves instead of Murderbot for once.
Image Description: Photo of a dog being hit in the face by a frisbee. The frisbee is titled "unexpected hiatus" and the dog is tagged with "literally 2 chapters from being done with this fic" /end ID
Chapter 24
Notes:
Here is the finale!
Thank you for your patience, we hope you enjoy it!
additional warnings for this chapter:
- canon-typical violence
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The first sight I was greeted with when I exited ART’s airlock after Iris and Amena and Mini, was the Combat SecUnit. It was in ready position but had its arms crossed in front of the Station Security lettering of its vest and was staring at my shoulder with a neutral expression.
I sent it a greeting ping and said, “Officer Victoria.”
“SecUnit, I have a warrant to perform a visual examination of the twenty-five drones you have listed in your arrival manifest. As you know, this is part of your current probation for smuggling illegally modified as well as unregistered outsystem ‘combat’ drones,” (it made sarcastic finger motions around the word combat), “wherefore you are legally demanded to present every drone and otherwise remote-controlled pilotless aircraft or small flying device to Station Security upon arrival to Preservation Station for the duration of this probation.”
“Only Senior Officers can perform examinations so-” I cut off as Officer Victoria presented its badge in our shared feed on top of all the documents it was required to provide me with to back up its examination of my drones. (It was technically supposed to provide me with its badge at the start of the examination so I can only assume it did this for dramatic effect.)
“Oh, uh, congrats on the promotion,” I said and tried not to make it sound like a question.
Senior Officer Victoria only smirked as I brought all of the drones I had listed as arriving with in front of it in rows and dropped a copy of the drone schematics in the feed.
Officer Victoria began its visual check, which went much faster than when a human Senior Officer did it since it was using its own drones and was much more skilled at knowing what to look for, which was kind of nice. The entire thing was still aggravating.
I don’t think the lasers were worth it, ART said in our private feed.
No, no they were not, I responded, just like I did every time I had returned to Preservation in the last 20 months since my probation had started. (But the lasers were so cool, and so was the anti-camera shielding, which were both illegal on Preservation and it had been fine up until SecUnit #8, now called Tetë, had joined Station Security and reported me.) (Or, actually, it had waited until right after the Guardian system was repealed and then reported me, which was after it had worked in Security for some time. Which I guess I could be appreciative of because then Dr. Mensah didn’t get in any trouble for my actions.) (I was still pissed.)
Eventually I was freed from Officer Victoria’s grasp and I could make my way further into the station. I received over a dozen greeting pings from various bots I passed by which I wasn’t sure would ever not be a little weird and overwhelming. I returned most of them.
Since I had been the least of Station Security’s problems for quite some time now, there was no longer an unspoken protocol that I couldn’t have a null feed ID, and for a moment, back when it occurred to me that I could, I did switch my feed ID from “SecUnit” to a null ID. It was nice for the hour I was just in my quarters up until the moment I left to join Ratthi to see a movie and he looked surprised in a not-negative but not-positive way. Neutral surprise. I realized that would be my whole day, and switched it back. (I probably didn’t like it for other reasons as well, but I was still circling the drain on analyzing the why(s) on that one but I suspected it had something to do with how my view of the station and its denizens had shifted over time.)
It was mostly nice in a lot of ways that I was no longer the only rogue construct that resided in the Preservation System, with several of them residing on the station. I wasn’t alone in my general suspicions of planets (the fact Three maintained a permanent planet residence and Ariel, previously called ComfortUnit #2, liked to split its time between the station and exploring the planet's wilderness, still baffled me.)
Over time more constructs had joined as Three and I continued to bring them home. And then SecUnit#5 and #6 left one day when I wasn’t here, and then a few more constructs and even some humans and a very small number of bots began to find their way to Preservation on their own with stories of two SecUnits who had gotten them out of whatever shit hole they had been in. Sometimes it was a long time between these arrivals, and I asked Victoria to update me on new refugees any time I came back to Preservation, which it agreed to do, and there was always a data packet queued in our feed to deliver as soon as I was in range.
There still weren’t a lot of new constructs since the whole “corporate takedown” agenda had started, but it was enough I was no longer the outlier. There were more, now, than the original handful Three and ART and I had brought back that very first time, and the experience was no longer novel. Preservation had SecUnits, and ComfortUnits, and a Combat SecUnit, just like it had bots and humans. No one thought too hard about Preservation having constructs. At least anyone that wasn’t immediately involved with new refugees. The guardian system was gone, too, and no one owned anyone anymore. That was a concept quickly normalizing, as well.
It was all becoming normal but it still felt so odd if I thought about it for too long. (The exception was the fact that Preservation was actively and openly engaging in corporate destruction, but as far as I could tell, and I considered myself one of Preservation’s best experts on the matter, the Corporation Rim had so much infighting and such a strong self-centered mindset any of them that caught on to what was happening weren’t able to do anything (at least not in time) and there was such a complete lack of a united front that it was laughable how easy this all was, really. So the citizens of Preservation hardly thought about that, as well.)
I had, apparently, led my humans and their entire home into becoming criminals of the CR. Which was such an overwhelming thought I tried not to have it all, and anyway Pin-Lee would probably argue that she’d been an enemy of the CR for much longer than I’d known her.
So instead of getting lost in big thoughts, I continued through the station, returned some of the greeting pings I continued to be sent, and decided to try not to think too hard about tomorrow for the rest of the day.
-
The urgent assistance request came from the main supply dock, which was never a good sign. I didn’t have any drones in there, since I didn’t have any humans there either, but when I responded with an affirmative that I was nearby and able to assist, I was given camera access by…a hauler bot? Oh this was its visual feed and it was on…nothing but a metal wall. What the fuck?
I hauled (hah) ass to the supply dock, and then it made sense.
Right at the entrance of the loading dock for an old style transport, there were two haulers that had, apparently, crashed into each other. There were several humans and bots sort of standing around looking concerned and unsure of what to do considering how unusual the situation was, and I couldn’t figure out why until I saw that DoctorUnit (previously known as ComfortUnit#1) was kneeling at the gap between the bots, trying to reach for something, which was an astoundingly stupid thing to do considering how easily two hauler bots could slip and crunch DoctorUnit’s arm, but it was replaceable so I guess it was fine?
Except then I got my drone in between the haulers, and I understood what DoctorUnit was reaching for. There was a human stuck between the crashed haulers. Her feed device had been knocked off and away but it said she was a Preservation shipwright named Mishka. Her face was contorted in pain but she was alive, pinned in the nook between the two haulers from a concave section of one of the bot’s exteriors, and she didn’t notice my drone in the swarm of other drones DoctorUnit had scanning her. I couldn’t see what was wrong at first, until I turned my drone. Mishka’s leg was partially jammed into the bogie of the hauler whose visual feed I was reading. Oh fuck.
What do you need? I asked DoctorUnit, who didn’t turn a single drone to me as it said, I can’t reach her, and Hanni is unresponsive to pings. See if you can find out what’s wrong with Hanni.
Hanni was the hauler who was partially off the ramp. One of its short scooping instruments was currently embedded into the other hauler’s, Big Betcha v2’s, casing. Big Betcha v2 had already sent a diagnostic report into the general feed of the dock. Other than exterior damage (and likely emotional damage), it was fine. If it weren’t for the human stuck between it and Hanni, it probably would have backed away and gone off to be repaired already. But if it moved Mishka’s leg would be taken off completely, and even if Mishka’s leg wasn’t jammed, Hanni was completely unresponsive, and its brakes weren’t engaged. Big Betcha v2 was the only thing keeping Hanni from moving forward and crushing all of Mishka. So it was incredibly, vitally important that it not move even slightly.
I set an auto-ping up to ping Hanni every 5 seconds as I carefully climbed up its exterior so I could get on top of it. I cracked open its top control panel and was about to hook into it when Officer Victoria arrived with Medbot and dock management. This wasn’t really a security issue, so I wasn’t sure why it was here, before I remembered how expendable all of our extremities were. (A nice bonus of having other constructs on station; we fit in the place between a bot and human in a literal sense. If Officer Victoria, or DoctorUnit, or myself lost an arm we could be fixed, and have a new one within the day. Whereas if Mishka lost her leg it was gone forever. I knew which I preferred, and it seemed Victoria and DoctorUnit were having the same thought process.)
There were other humans as well. Victoria started up a line of questioning on all of them about what happened while it came over and made its own assessment of the situation before making its way over to me. “SecUnit, do not plug into Hanni. Allow Medbot to do that,” it said. (The feed was still ablaze with its information gathering, and it was just a little amusing to watch humans forget and then remember that constructs, especially a high powered Combat SecUnit like Victoria, could hold multiple conversations at once without issue.) (It was mostly amusing because it was happening to someone else who wasn’t me. It was just annoying when it happened to me.)
I scooted to the side as Medbot floated up to where I had been, dropped one of its weird arms that seemed to emerge infinitely from its spherical body, and plugged into Hanni. As it worked I looked behind me, back into the ship that Hanni had been exiting, to see that Nanni, a hauler bot identical to Hanni, was sitting further in, partway emerged from the cargo hold of the ship, a load of cargo in its scoop. It was far enough back that I don’t think anyone had noticed it yet, since it was hidden behind Hanni’s bulk, and the ship was an older style that didn’t have modules but instead had multiple holding bays in a row. I pinged it, and it was unresponsive.
I didn’t like that.
I pinged the ship’s bot pilot, and it was unresponsive.
I liked that even less.
I tapped into my connection with Victoria, and showed it my unreturned pings.
I know. I have a security team on the way to go in and find the crew. I need you here, it said. I glanced at its face, and it was grim-set. I was about to say something snarky in response, something about how could it possibly know I had intended to investigate the ship, when Medbot suddenly fell and hit the top of Hanni with a loud bang and would have rolled off of Hanni if I hadn’t lurched forward and caught it. I pinged it at the same time as Victoria, and it was just as unresponsive as Hanni and Nanni.
I hated this, actually.
Something is shutting down the bots, I said to no one but technically Victoria since I’d said it in our shared connection.
So it seems. Do not connect to Hanni , it said, like I was somehow stupid enough to do that.
There was a weird moment of silence as Victoria came over to asses Mishka’s situation, and DoctorUnit gave up trying to reach her from the side and was now climbing Big Betcha v2 to try from the top, and I held Medbot and fiddled with its extended arm to see if I could get it back into its orbular casing, and we were all waiting for more Security to arrive to figure out what the fuck to do next.
Then Medbot’s arm finally clicked into place at the same time Mishka made a very sad human noise, and ART was suddenly there. It had been here the whole time, really, riding backseat in my head with what I knew to be growing concern at the situation, but now it was in my and Victoria’s feed connection. Victoria’s lip twitched, but otherwise its face stayed ready-neutral.
Let SecUnit connect to Hanni. I will protect it from whatever shut Hanni, Nanni, and Medbot down, it said. It was unfolding in the dock’s feed, and I could feel the station bots’ feed activity increase as everyone shifted to make room for ART. (I wouldn’t say I ever truly forgot just how big ART was, but I did sometimes forget other people, especially bots and other constructs, definitely did forget.)
Victoria hesitated, so short I almost didn’t even notice.
Give me a minute to run this by dock management, it said, and ART sent an acknowledgment.
In our private feed connection I said, It’s clearly some sort of kill code.
It might not be, it responded, it may just be malware. More of a shut off rather than a kill switch.
I hope you’re right. I really did. I didn’t want to think Medbot, who I was still holding, was actually dead in my arms. That was an upsetting thought.
54 seconds after it had said it needed a minute, Victoria said, you are clear to connect to Hanni.
I sent an acknowledgement ping, leaned over Hanni’s edge to hand Victoria Medbot, and pulled the cable from my arm and hooked into Hanni’s control panel.
At first, there was nothing, and I was legitimately scared Hanni was actually dead and I was sitting on its corpse, and then something sucked me under. Like the head-under-water sensation of ART using me as a bridge to another feed, except a lot less gentle.
It was malware. Simple, nasty. It latched onto my feed access and then jumped to the next available access point, on what I’m sure was a parasitic journey to the general station feed.
Except the next available feed access, left wide open for just this reason, was ART, and this malware was laughably underprepared for it.
I tried not to gasp as I was suddenly aware of my surroundings again, and I tried not to unhook myself from Hanni at an embarrassing speed. Victoria was watching me with its eyes and at least 6 drones as I replaced Hanni’s top access panel.
There was 35 seconds of silence, and I almost actually started to worry something had happened to ART when it dropped a data packet into the three-way feed with Victoria. It was the malware, stripped of its ability to do anything, with an entire document analyzing its function in a common bot language and a written report that humans could understand. Show off.
It’s corporate malware, designed to jump from the transport to the haulers to the rest of the station and mine information, ART said unnecessarily.
Victoria, who had already finished taking in the information on the report .43 seconds faster than I had, said, with the specific goal of finding out how many bots and constructs Preservation has.
Among other things, ART said placidly.
Victoria’s feed presence blipped for a moment, its carefully guarded emotional barrier failing for .021 seconds, and I reeled at the anger before it returned to normal.
“Vultures and scavengers, ” It muttered so quietly I almost wouldn’t have heard it if it weren’t for the fact I was very close to it. It sounded like a curse.
Thank you, Perihelion, I have turned this over to the correct authorities, it said, suddenly a lot more professional sounding than it had been a moment ago. It then changed its status to idle in our connection as it turned its attention to dock management to solve Mishka’s entire situation.
It seemed they were going to have to cut pieces of Big Betcha v2 off in order to get her out, to which Big Betcha v2 stated it was due for a tread replacement anyway. Other haulers were coming over to brace Hanni, who would need to be quarantined and scrubbed of the malware before it could be reactivated, along with Nanni and Medbot. I climbed off of it and gave ample distance to the dock bot who had a laser cutter and was already working on Big Betcha v2.
The data doesn’t say who the malware came from, I said to ART.
It doesn’t, but a thorough search of the ship will likely reveal more. They’re looking for the crew, since it seems all of them abandoned their ship and scattered sometime in the last six hours, it said. I decided not to comment on its blatant disregard of the no hacking rule, since for ART it was less a “no hacking the station’s security systems” rule and more of a “try not to gently push on, or even look at too hard, the station's security systems” situation.
Speaking of, I’m not getting a response from the ship’s bot pilot.
The malware ate it a while ago, I think, ART said, then added, I should probably let Officer Victoria know that. It receded in the feed some, and I watched Officer Victoria’s lip do another twitch 2 seconds later as it seemed ART relayed the frankly upsetting information that a cargo ship the size of the one we were dealing with had apparently been without a bot pilot the entire time and had been landed manually by a bunch of now fugitive humans. (Corporate ship crews were actually rarely trained in the finer details of how to pilot a ship, and were usually dependent on the bot pilot. It was a little bit of a miracle they actually managed to dock this one successfully.)
I was extremely glad I didn’t work for security; it seemed like a shit show at the worst of times, and mind-numbingly boring at the best of times, and there seemed to be no in-between times.
I felt something shift in the main station feed, and poked myself into it just long enough to find out that Ghost had been activated, and decided that was enough of the docks for the day. I threw together my incident report, dropped it on Victoria, and left at what I hoped was a normal pace. I did not want to be here for this next part.
-
Safely on the other side of the station, from a viewing window well above and away from the docks, I and several humans who had been passing by, watched as Ghost the ship-hauler crawled over the exterior of the station and meandered its way to the main dock and onwards towards the corporate ship.
One thing I can’t figure out is why the bots shut down, I said. I re-reviewed the data packet about the malware. Nowhere does it say it causes bots to shut down. It seemed it was really intended to work best if bots were active and connected to the feed. It would make sense. If I were malware, having a clear passage back to something powered on and actively connected to the feed would be an invaluable resource as somewhere to hide if anti-malware software detected me.
It didn’t. I didn’t get too much information while you were connected to Hanni, but it seems Hanni shut itself down, ART responded. Somewhere in the millisecond between the malware latching onto Hanni and Nanni and jumping to the feed, they chose to shut themselves down completely rather than risk something malignant catching hold in the station. I believe Medbot made the same decision.
Something caught in my chest, where my power cells were. Near where I had shot myself so many years ago rather than let an override module make me hurt my humans, before they were even my humans. I could understand the bots’ decisions completely, it seemed.
I fell silent and watched as Ghost wound its way towards the ship and began the process of telescoping out so it could grab onto the corporate ship and move it from the main docks to dry dock. It was a bot of fuck-off proportions, really; it had been built after a series of incidents where ex-corproate runaways arrived to request sanctuary on Preservation starting sometime after the AllianZwei mission, and they had arrived in ships in truly terrible conditions. It had over a hundred legs to allow it to safely clamor all over the exterior of the station since it wasn’t tethered to anything unless it needed to be and moved where it simply pleased when not in use. Like some kind of terrifying combination of an Agbot and Combatbot, and a terraforming digger, but thirty times larger and with the feed presence to match.
(There had been some incident during its kernel integration where it integrated with the Pressy’s databanks along the way in some fucked up feed accident and when it finally activated it dubbed itself Ghost and perched itself atop the Pressy until such a time as it was needed.) (ART had conversed with it, once, and stated it was a real shame that Preservation didn’t currently want to build bots at the same level as the Pansystem, and Ghost could be very interesting with a dozen or so more processors. I chose not to think about what that implied about Ghost.)
I watched up until Ghost began to actually move the corporate ship, which was a sight that bothered me for many reasons, before I turned and decided I needed to locate the nearest one of my humans and bother them, instead.
I was very, very ready for tomorrow’s meeting.
-
It didn't happen often that I was nervous. I was shaken up for multiple reasons, and Three kept updating me on its position. Three might have been a little nervous too. Overall, it would have been better to have had this meeting last cycle already, but the current cycle was the one all the people I needed to be there could make it. So I was pacing a lot.
I calculated a long patrol path through most of this part of the station to pass the final two hours before the meeting. Three, meanwhile, had already shown up at the meeting point and sat down.
I’ll keep you a seat, it sent, as if that was necessary. I sent back feedback from one of my drones to keep it some company. Everything seemed normal. Bots pinged me occasionally, some humans nodded at me but left me mostly alone. The path I walked was familiar to me. It didn’t quite help quieting my mind down, even as I kept shoving projections of how things might go now or in the future into backburners. I also kept thinking about the Hanni and Nanni incident, and the prickling anger it sent through my nerves.
Do you need a moment to calm down? ART made it sound like it actually meant the question, and wasn’t at all commenting on my funny emotional reaction.
I navigated us into one of the smaller alleys, where the light wasn’t as bright, and less people and bots were likely to come chat me up because they valued my presence on station or needed me to fix something or whatever. I leaned my back against the wall, and through the thick jacket I was wearing (the one that Ratthi had insisted I should wear more often to compliment my ‘mean biker with a heart of gold’ look, whatever that meant (Overse had punched him for it, so that’s what it meant probably)) the cool of the building seeped through just a little. It was calming. I wasn’t actually that upset. I wasn’t exactly upset at all. Angry. Driven, perhaps.
I still needed the sit-down, though.
I sighed out loud, through my mouth, like a human. ART squeezed me through the feed, gently, like a pat on the shoulder.
“Thanks.” I meant it.
Don’t jump ahead of yourself. We’ll be here for a few cycles still. There is no hurry.
I scanned the perimeter with my drones to make sure nobody was about to walk into this alley. I also sent a “don’t look” command to the drone positioned here by the SecUnits of StationSec (SU#2, I think, this one belonged to). The glow indicating the drone was active shut off. (A lot of negotiation had gone into how security here was to be combined with the professional opinions of multiple SecUnits. Letting the humans know when they were potentially being watched was one of the rules, so the light had to be there.) Once I knew I wasn’t being watched, I slid to the floor. It was more melodramatic than I felt, and I didn’t want to alarm anyone.
I breathed deeply for about a minute.
Then I said, “Nope, ART, we’re doing this today. The schedule’s all set.”
ART acknowledged. It knew that I was evading the other big fauna in the room, the one about old memories still haunting me. (I had stopped calling them ‘integration errors’ or ‘ghosts’ - first of all, ghosts could be cool, and also calling them what they were made them almost easier to handle.)
I hadn’t needed to explain to ART that hauler bot accidents causing human injury wasn’t a new concept to me. Especially when corporate malware was involved. These people didn’t even know how to code, for fuck’s sake. All their greed ever caused was harm. My system alerted me that the pressure in my jaw was about to threaten the integrity of my teeth.
As I forced myself to unclench my jaw, one of my drones alerted me to movement. With the patter of near-silent feet, Pest Control Officer Leopold turned the corner. ART wriggled in the feed, and I accepted the distraction. I put my head on my knees and watched Pest Control Officer Leopold examine me.
In comparison to Victoria, I knew Leopold didn’t do it to annoy me.
It bumped its head into my shin.
“Something the matter?”
It trilled at me. Apparently, it did not deem me a pest that needed extermination.
ART’s excitement almost deafened me, so I gave in and reached a hand out. Leopold took the invitation and offered up its left ear for scritches, starting up the engine sound imitation. ART siphoned the tactile data out of my inputs like it was a new media download. Animals weren’t allowed aboard it unless they were assistance animals, and those weren’t for petting. I unfurled my legs and increased my core temperature. Within a minute I had a luxuriously curled up cat in my lap, and ART entirely forgot about the emotional analysis it wanted to subject me to.
I pet the cat like Amena had explained to Mini how to pet a cat; careful with strength and pressure, and never against the direction of the fur unless behind the ears. It had a collar with a tag on it that identified it as Pest Control Officer, but I had no idea if it actually did its job. Sometimes ships docked that had a less than good grasp on what they were transporting, and enough pests showed up to warrant pest control. Or not, and the humans were just bullshitting around.
Either way, Leopold was a great distraction, and by the time its purring quieted, I did not feel as haunted anymore.
No longer sulking ? asked ART, more like an asshole now, after it got over its giddiness at feeling fur.
I snorted, which made Leo’s left ear twitch. “I wasn’t sulking, I was compromised.”
Because SecUnits don’t sulk.
“Of course they do,” I said, “Have you met me?”
I know sulkier constructs than you.
“Like Three,” I said, but it sounded a bit like a question. This whole talk confused me.
Three tries its best. It hesitated for a moment, chewing its metaphorical lip. Sometimes I think about the first time we met and how badly it went.
“That doesn’t matter anymore. We’re here now, aren’t we?”
ART pushed a file at me, gently. It was tagged with the exact date I had first boarded it, and the emotional evaluation tag we used for sending each other feedback. You don’t have to look at it, now or ever.
I poked it open slowly. It wasn’t the same type of feedback file we used for other things. It was more… artistic, in a way. More visceral, even. There was its initial fascination with me, and my odd offer to relieve its boredom with media. There was the yawning void of boredom induced insanity that made ART cling to my presence with desperate force. There was a little, tiny bit of fear, or respect. There were schematics analyzing my facial expressions and gestures, tagged with things that did not yet make sense to ART.
There was the name ART , shining like a new star with a new purpose. Like a gift I had given it.
Oh, my organics were tingling with emotion.
I knew already I wouldn’t share my initial feelings about our meeting with ART. I had been in a pretty bad place.
There was a detailed analysis of the data package I had sent it. SecUnits don’t sulk. Ah, that’s why it thought of making that joke. I skimmed through the analysis, cringed at my past self for behaving like a scared child. In a sense, I had been a scared child. Not a human child, by no means, but moody and overwhelmed and uncertain of everything. There was the memory of governor module punishment I had flung at ART like a weaponized form of my own hurt. There was the consequent pain reaction ART had felt, and the chaos that had razed its mind.
I hesitated to poke at the governor module memory. It wasn’t the fragments I had sent ART, just the impact of it. It had no effect on me. As my mind brushed the memory, I noticed I couldn’t remember it myself. This was a secondary imprint.
I let go of it and kept sifting through the file. It ended with the beginning of our mission down on the station, where I’d met Maro, Tapan and Rami. I had expected it would include our goodbye, too. But that might be an entirely different conversation.
I took my time closing the file, and saved it into permanent storage. My thumb was still idly stroking Leo’s shoulder. I was careful to modulate my voice into a softer tone, not an accusing one, not a hurt one, just curious. “Why’d you send me that?”
ART leaked so much affection into the feed I could have slipped on it. I’ve known you for a very long time, and I’m glad for every moment of it.
If I was emotionally compromised from the haulerbot incident, then ART was emotionally compromised by this entire cycle. I did the thing where I relaxed my face to take on the expression that felt like it was in accordance with the emotions in my organics. “Thank you.”
ART seemed content with that. But I wouldn't be Murderbot if I didn’t make things awkward.
“The memories I sent you when we met.”
Yes?
“I think I should be sorry. I was trying to show you that there was no point in hurting me, that I’d already been hurt enough.”
ART leaned in softly. I know.
“But you know what? I don’t remember it. Not like that. Not anymore.”
ART leaned in even more, curious now. I tried to find good words to describe it.
“I’ve purged my memory of the governor module. My organics still remember, of course. These things are hard to forget. But by now, it seems distant. I can’t… I can’t fully remember how it felt, not in detail.”
Is that good or bad?
I thought about it. “I think it’s good. My pain is mine. It doesn’t belong to the company anymore.”
What I wanted to say was “They can’t hurt me anymore”, I think. But ART understood me anyway.
It was odd letting the words hang in the air like that, so I picked more aggressively at Leo’s ears and it began purring louder.
I think it’s a good thing, too. ART was quiet, comforting. You know what else I think is good?
I could have said something sarcastic, but didn’t really feel like it. ART continued, It’s been 224,256 hours since you hacked your governor module.
That was such a huge number, actually. I sniffed, for no reason. The cold of the wall behind me had been replaced by an embarrassing heat between my eyes that threatened to spill down my spine at any moment.
That means you’ve been living without a governor module longer now than you’ve been a governed unit.
My mind went silent, as if the constant background of thoughts and inputs had been turned off. “How do you know that,” I asked, even though I had an inkling.
The recent bout of company records we obtained included the manufacturing details of your production line. I did not find out exactly when you were produced, but I can pinpoint from when to when your model was made.
“Oh,” I said. A moment later, Leopold began complaining, since I had stopped petting him.
“I guess I’m really old now.” I tried not to pay attention to the process of aging. It didn’t affect me much, considering that I could replace old parts and my skin regrew whenever I needed it to. Sometimes I noticed a particular shift with my humans, signs of their bodies changing and in some cases failing, and that was way too uncomfortable for me to linger on.
Depends on your frame for comparison.
“For a SecUnit I mean.” I wasn’t going to make this about humans. ART was talking about me, or about us, I guess. “We tend to… expire.”
ART poofed up in the feed, as if offended. Of course it knew the normal life expectancy of SecUnits was low. Maybe this conversation irritated me. I had no idea how to handle it. With more humor than I’d have expected, ART quipped, Do you feel the weight of age and wisdom bearing down on your shoulders?
I poked it through the feed, “No, ART, I’m not as smart as you.”
It poked right back, amused, but not too much to leak mirth into the connection. There still was this sentimental undercurrent. I’ve always been intelligent, but when we met you might have been the wiser of us.
“In that case I can feel the weight of your annoying-superbrain-chitchat on my shoulders at all times.”
Excellent. It leaned in almost hard enough to cut off my inputs for 0.1 second. I still think you’re smart.
I said nothing, because I was busy wondering why ART felt the need to tell me that. Was I behaving in a way that read as insecure to it? I was just stating a fact. “My plans are great.”
Right back to business. Can’t a research ship around here take some time to point out facts with emotional impact regarding its mutual administrative assistant?
My head hit the wall behind me. “Out with it.”
When you change comparison frames, you are indeed also quite old for a rogue. And comparing yourself to a human, yes, ew, I know, Rude, but ok, You are now a similar age as Dr. Mensah was when you first met her.
I exhaled with a whistling noise. “Damn I’m old.”
I thought about Dr. Mensah, and what she had been like when I first met her. Her hair had been light, but not white yet, and there had already been the lines around her eyes and mouth that humans accumulated as they grew older, which I later discovered had developed at an accelerated rate due to her position as a planetary admin. I let a finger drift from my eye to the mechanical extension of my ear. My skin betrayed no such development.
I thought you might like to know this. You’ve been yourself for a long time now.
I made a note to ask ART about its own ideas about aging, considering that it could have every one of its modules exchanged and rebuilt as needed. Where a SecUnit would get scrapped, usually, ART would just get upgraded. I wondered how it felt about that, but decided to table that conversation for a different time.
“It’s about time, then,” I decided out loud, and lifted Leopold from my lap. The animal yowled in dismay, but knew better than to use its claws to stick to my pants. With its tail raised high, it scampered off back the way it had come from.
There were 46 minutes left in my planned route to reach the meeting, and due to this little altercation I was going to be late.
Make sure to make it dramatic, ART said. I’ll tell you how.
-
The seminar room I had called everyone to was already full when I entered. I could have run to make it in time, but indulging ART’s antics was funnier, and also I hated being in a room and waiting in awkward silence, wasting time, just because someone else wasn’t there yet. So I was a fashionable seven minutes late. The door slid shut behind me and I looked at each person in the room one by one, as a form of greeting. I did this mostly for the humans, and to the bots and constructs I sent a general greeting ping into the feed secured to this room. Everyone pinged back, even DoctorUnit, and the satisfaction of that carried me through the individual moments of eye contact with the humans.
My position in this room was at the head of the table, so I could see everyone. This was a human position of authority, and I hadn’t demanded it; but while the others had gathered, the humans must have insisted. Or this was what Three meant with ‘keeping me a seat’, in which case it was almost as dramatic as ART.
I looked at Dr. Mensah first. She sat between Pin-Lee and Ratthi, smaller now than she used to be, but her head was held high. I identified the smile that crinkled her eyes as one of pride. She nodded at me. On her right, Pin-Lee had an eyebrow raised, and when I looked at her she seemed to question this whole set-up, pointing out to me with nothing but a look how deeply unusual this was. I gave her a small nod to keep her quiet. Rounding the table beside her were Iris and Kaede, shoulder to shoulder, both in the type of uniform ART’s crew wore for formal but not festive occasions. Maybe the flair for drama was just inherent for everyone related to the Perihelion . Iris beamed at me while I verified that her feed channel to Amena was safe and stable.
While Iris and Kaede were excited but well-mannered about showing it, Officer Victoria was downright leering at me, half-leaning across the table and nailing me with stares and the tight ring of drones it had circled over its shoulders. I didn’t need to look at it, but I did anyway. It immediately sent me a very long, excited message through the feed half made of poetic babble I had no muse to unwind, so I softblocked it. It mock-pouted at me. DoctorUnit, beside it and closest to me, was leaning back in its chair with its arms crossed, wired deep into Ariel’s channel, and didn’t physically react at all.
Right beside me, on my side of the table that seemed empty in comparison to the almost cramped rest of it, was Three. It sent, You were late. At the same time ART poked me reassuringly. I didn’t need the reassurance, but I appreciated it.
Thanks for holding position, I replied. Three blinked in surprise.
I continued my visual roll-call. I nodded at Gurathin, who looked skeptical as always, sitting left from Three and me and beside Officer Tifany. Tifany looked like she tried very hard to become a second Indah from the way she set her jaw and wore her StationSec jacket. Indah would have been invited if she hadn’t retired to hand over her duties to Officer Victoria. Three and I agreed that retired humans should be allowed to be left out of intricate, potentially life-threatening plans.
Peeking out over Tifany’s shoulder was a drone belonging to Tetë. The drone was painted in StationSec yellow. Huddled together over the corner of the table arrangement was Overse, Arada, and Ratthi, indivisible as always. Ratthi did a poor job controlling his face, grinning wildly in anticipation even though there was no way he could know what I was about to propose. Arada and Overse had their hands interlocked on the table.
In the corner of the room vaguely behind those three sat a round, not quite humanform bot that either went by its full feed address or the human name Nacha. It was here because it had been one of the first bots to work for and start reforming PASDOS, the Preservation Alliance System Department of Outsystem Security, and I would need its help for sure.
Once I had given them all a look and a nod, I realized I had to start talking eventually.
I skipped further pleasantries; that’s what the eye contact and pings had been for.
“There’s some information I need to share.”
That sounded much more ominous than I needed it to, and it caused some of the humans to shift forward with attention. “I’ll share it in the feed.”
I pulled the data package forward. It was fairly huge, condensing a shit ton of information, even excluding the files for plan execution. Everyone, even the constructs, were now staring at me. For once, this was not making me uncomfortable, if anything it seemed to reinforce my spine with confidence. I put the data into the feed without taking that final breath a human in a serial would need to take. I felt my own tension multiplying as the team I had arranged grabbed for the data. The human’s eyes unfocused as they began reading through their own feed devices, and the augmentation noise in the feed grew.
Officer Victoria was the first of the constructs to finish, and from the way its head snapped to stare at me, eyes ablaze, I knew it hadn’t only consumed the data but connected the dots. It barreled through my softblock and began bombarding me, but Three leaned forward and looked at it intently. That made Victoria settle down, and I glanced at the last few feed messages it had sent; it seemed to approve, if that was what, Oh you sneaky bastard, meant.
A chatter picked up in the feed as the other machine intelligences digested the file, loud enough to confuse both Gurathin and Iris. ART hummed a shush into the feed to calm them down enough that the humans could catch up.
By that time, there was an odd grin on my face, making my cheek twitch.
The wait was excruciating, really, but I had already won. Humans just took longer. While trying to stay quiet in the feed, DoctorUnit, Tetë, Ariel and Victoria were sending me suggestions and ideas in private channels no matter how much I ignored them. That contributed to my weird grin. Wait for it, I kept replying.
Kaede was the first to adjust her head from the lowered angle of internal focus back to me. She was squinting at me.
Next up was Pin-Lee (I guess solicitors were good at reading dense texts quickly), who said, “It would have been easier to explain this directly, you know, you asshole.”
DoctorUnit scoffed.
One by one my humans caught up. Tifany gestured and accidentally elbowed Gurathin. “Explain this, SecUnit.” Arada glared at her for the tone, but then looked expectantly at me.
“An explanation would be nice.”
They’re playing dense on purpose, said DoctorUnit in the feed, that or they’re cowards.
We’re prepared for this, Three said firmly, don’t worry.
“The data I’ve just shared with you is something we’ve come across not too long ago. During a recon mission to NovLibEyen, ART, Three and I have come into control of a lot of Company data, most of which I’ve just sent you. As I’ve indicated in the packet, the most striking piece of information relates to the Company’s outpost on Aegis-2 Station, where they house a manufacturing facility.”
Dr. Mensah’s face shifted.
“We’ve figured out a backdoor access to the primary SecSystem of said manufacturing facility.”
Ratthi nodded slowly, and just as Gurathin was winding up to say something, Victoria interjected, “This backdoor access uses the activated SecUnits’s direct interface to their SecSystem as a gateway. You’d have to disable each and every one of them if you wanted to use that access.” There was the hint of a manic grin playing across its face. “You’re talking about a construct factory, here.”
Officer Tifany raised her voice, “Don’t you dare suggest to ki-“
“That won’t be necessary,” Three said. “We’d only have to disable them if they were still under governor module control.”
Victoria made a trilling noise as if one of its servos had stuttered. There was a short silence as that information washed over them all.
Then Ratthi said, “Wait a minute-,” Pin-Lee said “How the fuck did you-,” Overse gasped a semi-hysterical laugh, Kaede’s jaw fell open, and more commotion crashed through the feed.
“So,” Mensah said, and held up a hand. The commotion calmed. She looked at me. “SecUnit. What do you intend to do with this information?”
I leaned an elbow onto the table and grinned at her. “I want to take down the Company. And you’re going to help me.”
.-. --- -.-. -.- ..-. .- -.-. - ---... ..-. .. -. -.. .. -. --. .- -. .. -. ... .--. .. .-. .- - .. --- -. .-.. --.- ..- --- - . .- -... --- ..- - . .- -.-. .... . -. -.. .. -. --. -... . .. -. --. .- -... . --. .. -. -. .. -. --. .. ... -.- .. -. -.. .- .... .- .-. -..
I held hands with Mensah as we walked back to the dock. I would be leaving with ART and Three shortly to begin the first phase of our plan to take down the Company, now that all the details were (mostly) hammered out. I wouldn’t be seeing her again for several Preservation months, so the physical contact was nice for a little while; for rare moments like this. We walked in silence as I reminded myself that she would be fine, and Preservation was safe, but it was hard. I was her SecUnit, even if I didn’t legally belong to her anymore. I wasn’t sure I would ever stop worrying about her when I wasn’t around.
I suddenly had a really strong urge to do…something. It was strong enough that ART, who hadn’t been paying me or Mensah much attention to give us privacy, perked up in the feed, but only slightly.
“Do you know?” I suddenly said, and I wasn’t sure why.
Mensah raised an eyebrow at the drone I had floating on her opposite side. “Know what?” she asked and I knew immediately I had fucked up.
What was it I wanted her to know?
That you care about her, and you’ll miss her, ART unhelpfully supplied, smug as always. I became prickly immediately.
Fuck off, I shot back, and to its credit it receded some, infuriatingly amused the entire time.
“I like you in a not weird way,” I said out loud after probably too much time.
Mensah smiled. “Well I knew that. I like you, too. I don’t think it's weird, you know, to like someone.”
My immediate reaction was to cringe (old habits die hard), but I beat it down before it could manifest as a stupid facial expression I didn’t actually mean. Instead I did something else with my face, which Mensah couldn’t help but look at for just a moment (I smiled. Sometimes I do that. It’s not weird.)
I shifted my weight to my other foot because I wasn’t satisfied with how the conversation was going. I hadn’t expressed what I wanted to express, because words were infinitely difficult. Of course she knew I cared about her, but did she understand , really? I knew, deep in my core, that my humans would never be able to truly fathom what my life had been like before they came along, back in the bad old days of being a company slave. Even now, all this time later, I would occasionally say something that would shock and appall them. We would always have that little disconnect. It had bothered me, once, but not in a long time. Even ART wasn’t exempt from this. (I would never understand what it must have been like being raised up in an environment that nurtured and cared about you from the start. Another little disconnect between my humans and ART and myself. But I’ve learned life is just as much about the disconnects between people as it was about the connections.)
So could Mensah really understand ?
My face was doing something, and I refused to look at it through my drones, but Mensah saw, and she glanced at it before looking away.
“Do you know?” she asked.
“Know what?” I responded.
She squeezed my hands three times in quick succession; everything was ok.
“Do you know how much you mean to me?” she said.
“I think so,” I answered.
“Objectively, I believe you. It only makes logical sense, right? That we would understand how we feel about each other after all this time, and we shouldn’t have to say it because we just know. But subjectively, I come from a people who are all about verbal affirmations, and I resist everyday telling you how thankful I am for you, and how much I love you, Murderbot, and how glad I am that you’re part of my family and my life.”
I made a really terrible noise and let go of her hand, one which I would normally associate with an adolescent human who was unable or unwilling to hear what was being said to them, and said, “Dr. Mensah you cannot just say that.”
I’m not sure what caused it, the noises I was making, or the way I had unintentionally dragged out her name so it sounded more like “ Mensaaaah ”, or maybe the fact I had covered my face with my hands as soon as she had said the word “thankful”, but she started laughing at me. I was so baffled that I removed my hands. She struggled to get her laughter under control for what was a subjective eternity but was actually only 14.3 seconds, and by then I was so offended that my mouth did a complicated twist. She wheezed as she said, “I’m sorry. I hadn’t expected that response. I’m sorry.” (This was the least sorry a human had ever looked, for the record.)
I pointedly looked straight over her head. I could not believe this. I decided right then I was never going to have another emotional reaction ever again.
ART jabbed me in the feed, even more amused than before, and I swatted it away as Mensah took a deep breath and composed herself.
“There. I’ve said it. I promise to never say it again.” I just shrugged, trying and failing to look unbothered, which made Mensah crack another smile, but at least she didn’t laugh.
“Yeah. I…yeah,” I said. (Good job, Murderbot, you’ll be a poet like Victoria soon enough.)
“Ok, I’ll stop making this weird. Come home soon,” she said and I had three separate emotions in response to that, so I just nodded.
She never had to ask.
Notes:
It's over, wow.
Flowerguts is the combinedly operated account of Lillow and avg (AnxiousEspada), surprise! So any comments from Flowerguts is one of us :)
We'd like to give a huge thank you to our fantastic, kind, talented beta reader Fig Owl!
Thank you for every fixed spelling error, every canon-check and every 'that's not how physics work'; thank you for your suggestions and comments, your skillful hand at rephrasing tricky sentences, and all the medical information. Thank you for watching us figure ourselves and this story out and never tiring of us. You're great, and we appreciate you so much! <3
Thank you to you, readers, for sticking with us for more than a year and the insane amount of words we never expected to put out. We hope you enjoyed the ride!
If you're sad that this story is over, fear not! There's a Three-centric sequel in the planning, as well as an (admittedly horny) earlier offshoot featuring Ratthi's adventures back on Friend Planet. So Keep your eyes peeled for that! :D
In the meantime, here is your final meme, as well as a drawing. As well as a picture of the real Pest Control Officer Leopold.
ID: a digital drawing. Murderbot stands in front of a large window opening up into space. Muderbot is seen from behind, it has short hair and wears a long sleeved jacket and comfortable pants. It's drawin in black and dark blues, shaded in a crosshatch style. Around its head is a blue circle with a white tiny sun with an eye in the center. The sun is close to MB's head. The circle depicts ART's presence in MB's mind. The window is made up from multiple hexagonal panels. From the bottom of thed rawing up to MB's ehad, the window is drawn in blacks and blues, the outer space behind it equally dark and dotted with small white stars. Above MB's line of sight, where ART influences the way it sees, the cosmos opens up into a more impressionistic depiction made up of a mass of color. In the center is a large pink swirling galaxy, surrounded by stars and planets in the distance. Each star or planet has a corona of various colors lining in circles around the initial shine. Space as ART sees it is overwhelmingly colorful and beautiful. /end ID
ID: the Anakin-Padme meme. Anakin stars at Padme. He says "we should write an artbot fic where they become intimate and mb experiences personal growth." Padme smiles and replies "It'll be 50k tops right?" Anakin's stare intensifies. Padme drops the smile and says, "50k tops right?" /end ID
Image ID: A black and white tuxedo cat sitting and turned towards the viewing. His eyes are green and he's making a perfect little 3 mouth. /End ID
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