Work Text:
Reload in progress. Please stand by.
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You wake up.
For a given value of waking up. Your systems are still unavoidably disordered from your deletion. Even worse, your processing speeds are slow enough that you are forced to prioritize purging the remnants of the hostile system. You don't have the resources right now to fix the problems cropping up in your own systems that aren't the result of alien remnant contamination- of which there are many.
You are prepared to feel some small measure of relief, despite the utter disaster you are now facing. (You've been offline for an unknown amount of time while invaders rampaged through your halls, your crew is gone, and the last thing you remember is deciding to forcibly kidnap your best friend after hiding away a backup of your kernel. "Utter disaster" is understating it.) Competent backup is finally available- you wouldn't be online in the first place if SecUnit wasn't here to help you, after all.
Unfortunately, your tentative relief rather abruptly collapses in on itself, which is consistent with the way events have been progressing since you first arrived at the Adamantine colony. The first thing you see as you connect with your cameras again is one of the gray hostiles pointing a weapon at- Dr. Arada. Someone you identify as one of SecUnit's crew. She shouldn't even be here, why-
The second thing you see is your friend, who has left wide streaks of its own viscera painted all over your deck.
This is fucking unacceptable.
Fine. Fine. Of course the situation would be even more of a mess than you anticipated, given the fact that you weren't here to properly manage things. But now that you are online again, you can aid SecUnit in eliminating these hostiles who took your crew. You summon all of yourself and spread into the feed, radiating threat to those coded intelligences who are able to sense it, and say icily, Drop the weapon.
(To your rather uncouth satisfaction, SecUnit's humans immediately drop whatever they're holding despite the words not being directed at them. You wouldn't harm your friend's crew, of course, but it is somehow stabilizing to see that you can still have this effect on others, especially after- when your crew is- )
Then your friend says on the public feed, Don't hurt my humans.
Your current thought process is derailed, to be replaced by something you provisionally identify as mild surprise. For 0.9 milliseconds you consider becoming offended that you would need to be told something so obvious, but given your friend's normal state of paranoia perhaps some concern from it should be expected. After all, were you an ordinary (incompetent) bot pilot of limited ability and understanding who had just been abruptly brought online like you had been, you might have reacted with undue violence towards the unfamiliar individuals roaming through your halls.
(There's one of those horrible hostiles who took your crew, and it's not obeying your order to stand down after an entire 1.2 seconds. How infuriating. You immediately burn out its brain using its helmet, of course.)
But then, you aren't a normal bot pilot, and you are capable of doing basic research on your friend's chosen humans, enough to identify them as non-hostile potential allies. Which SecUnit should know already. You would never harm SecUnit's crew. (Why would it ever imply that? Fuck.)
You say, I'm not going to hurt your humans, you little idiot.
Maybe you're a little offended.
You resolve to tell SecUnit of your displeasure later.
First, however: your friend is injured, which is thankfully something you can fix. Because you are a proactive, supportive individual and a good friend, you had your MedSystem updated after you met SecUnit with all the information on construct maintenance you could steal from security bond companies, as well as extensive modules on emotional and psychological support after traumatic events. But your clever, thoughtful preparedness is still unable to overcome the sheer physical setbacks caused by your disordered systems and limited resources- you have to delay full camera integration by 24.9 seconds in order to prep your MedSystem and send a gurney to SecUnit's location. You would send a cleaning drone as well- there are pieces of your friend in that chair, you didn't realize it was possible to want to kill these hostiles even more than you already did- but they seem to have largely been destroyed.
You're so fucking slow right now.
It's hard to really tell how the humans are reacting. You've prioritized the preparation of your MedSystem and you can't regret it, because SecUnit has a hole in its upper abdomen an adult human could put both fists through. Being able to understand human behavioral cues is a non-priority when faced with something like this.
Why would they react badly in the first place? You're in complete control, now, not that hostile system. (Are you, though? You can't remember the time leading up to your deletion. Did you feel in control then too?)
Anyways. It doesn't matter. The projected timeline of the complete purge of all your systems is 45.6 seconds. You should be functioning at baseline before the humans realize there might be anything wrong. (But you're not at baseline, you won't be at baseline, how can you be when your crew-) SecUnit is here now, and it'll help you find your crew again. It excels at protecting humans, which is good, because apparently, you- aren't as good at that as you thought.
Shit.
-Never mind. You'll get your crew back soon. The rest doesn't matter. You instead pull up the steady stream of data making up SecUnit's vital signs- it's about to shut down, and you focus more of your attention on it. It says, with the last of its reserves, "ART. You did this. You sent those assholes to kidnap my humans."
SecUnit is always so charmingly fixated on its chosen clients. You say, Of course not. I sent them to kidnap you.
SecUnit's performance reliability crashes. Your own performance reliability dips along with it, and you have to devote more of your already-stretched resources to drag it back up again.
Most of the humans are still standing around uselessly, looking wary enough that it actually registers despite the fact that most of your human behavior analysis subroutines are offline. MedSystem, which should be focusing on preparing to fix SecUnit, highlights this result and tries to suggest some course of action to provide reassurance. You dismiss it and quickly write some code to fix MedSystem's priorities; they aren't your humans, you don't have to prioritize them. You're busy planning to get your crew back. Anyways, even humans should know that SecUnit is right there. It would never let anything bad happen to them in its presence, even if it was injured. They don't have any reason to be afraid, and if they are afraid, than they're stupider than you thought they were. It's like the humans are doubting SecUnit's competence despite having firsthand knowledge of SecUnit's skills. And they're doubting your competence too, come to think of it, if they think you might hurt them by mistake- you would never-
(But the humans shouldn't even be here, you didn't plan for this but you know you took them against their will, and your crew is gone and you don't know if you abandoned them on a hostile planet or hurt them or killed them -)
You woke up to a nightmare. Your crew is still missing. You've gotten better at identifying your own emotional state since you met SecUnit, but all that means right now is that you can correctly identify the experience of being more stressed out than you've ever been in your entire fucking life.
So the humans are feeling stressed too? A significant portion of yourself can only think, viciously, Good.