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Most of Three’s existence had been spent on ships, orbital installations, stations, and the like. Places where everything was constructed in neat lines of metal and nothing ever shifted unexpectedly under one’s feet. But Three had been deployed with a unit of Barish-Estranza that engaged with planetary colonies, and so it had walked on a scattering of naturally-occuring surfaces as well.
One defunct colony had been overrun by migrating tides of sand dunes. They shifted with the strong winds that blew across the planet’s surface, a side effect of its extreme weather. Too extreme for a viable colony, as it turned out. Three remembered the feeling of walking across those dunes; the way millions of grains slipped and rolled beneath its armored boots, slowing its progress, sending its ankles tweaking in unexpected directions. Three had been thankful to return to the familiar, steady floor of the Barish-Estranza ship. Despite its best efforts, grains of sand had leaked from the joints of its armor for days after.
Being a Governed Sec-Unit under Barish-Estranza had been much like walking through the halls of a ship. There were no surprises. Things were steady, predictable (sterile, lifeless). Every interaction was filtered and structured through layers of B-E protocol and the ever-present corralling of the Governor Module. One, Two, and Three had carved away little hollows of companionship into that bedrock, and it had never occurred to Three to dream of more.
And then One and Two had been deactivated (abandoned, fried, killed) and 2.0 had offered Three a universe of freedom wrapped in a tiny little bundle of code.
Every moment since running that code and deactivating its Governor Module had been a struggle against the constant shifting of sands under Three’s feet. When one was free to make one’s own choices, suddenly the vast network of probabilities exploded out around oneself. Choices of everything, and each with its own ramifications, tumbling against one another like billions of particles of sand under one’s unsuspecting foot.
The mission parameters of aiding the Perihelion’s crew and the Preservation survey team had provided relieving clarity during Three’s first free hours. Looking back at the swirling grains of probability, Three wasn’t sure it would have accepted the Governor Module hack had such a clear objective not been present. But it had, and it was now long past that point of divergence, no matter how the choice of a millisecond and everything it has changed continued to make its head spin.
The human members of the PresAux team and the Perihelion crew were bafflingly, unfailingly kind. The B-E crew always treated Three with the same irritable disinterest with which they treated the coffee machine, and the lift buttons, and the navigational displays. The Preservation and Perihelion humans never failed to ask Three what it wanted, which was a question as shocking as it was unanswerable, at least at first.
Three thought and thought about it, since there was little else to occupy its processing capacity during the twenty cycles it took for a Preservation ship to make contact with the Perihelion. It was easiest, at first, to determine what it did not want. It did not want to be deactivated or have its memory wiped. It did not want to go back to Barish-Estranza. It did not want harm to come to these strange, kind humans, nor did it want to give the Perihelion any more cause to threaten it.
But, over time, that thought infected it. What do I want? It crept along the pathways of Three’s mind like the slinking effects of Alien Remnant Contamination, gaining strength all the while.
The secret little caverns chiseled away with One and Two gaped like craters within Three at all times. They wept like the edges of projectile wounds in organic tissue. They ached like dislocated joints. Three’s first Want, expressed to Murderbot 2.0, had been I want to help retrieve our clients. Three’s second Want, expressed to no one but itself, was I want One and Two back.
It was an irrational, pointless Want. It had a probability of 0.00 percent. Thinking about it made the tight, suffocating feeling arise in Three’s chest; the one that occurred whenever it had witnessed One or Two receive punishment from a Barish-Estranza employee. But that made no sense, and so Three’s attention was diverted for 2.3 hours as it hunted through Murderbot 1.0’s shared media files for answers and, finally, identified that feeling as anger.
Three disliked that tight-chested feeling. Another Not-Want identified: I do not want to be angry. It was not a productive feeling and never had been. So Three pushed it aside and turned its focus towards identifying an achievable Goal.
One and Two were gone. Murderbot 2.0 was gone. But Murderbot 1.0 was there, despite how it so often seemed to want to vanish from everyone’s perception. But Three could see how its feed was always alight with shared activity with the Perihelion, so maybe it was more approachable than it appeared on the outside. An identified Want, extrapolated from the pointless Want for One and Two–I want to share companionship with other Sec-Units– became I want to share companionship with 1.0.
That was an acceptable Want. It fell within reasonable parameters of success, although Three had to acknowledge that its dataset was muddled. 1.0 had a stated aversion to relationships, despite its clearly fierce love and protectiveness for its humans. Three had witnessed Amena once on a couch in the Argument Lounge, swathed neck-to-toe in an enormous fluffy blanket, and 1.0’s feed presence with the Perihelion resembled nothing so much as that.
Three did not understand why it would be so contradictory in its communication. Communication with One and Two had always been as straightforward as they could manage while skirting the edges of their Governor Modules.
Three was not very successful at traversing the dunes of interaction with 1.0. It did not feel particularly successful at traversing any of its interactions in its time aboard the Perihelion, although it accumulated numerous useful data-points about socialization that it was hopeful would collate into a database of behavioral standards with time.
The Preservation ship arrived, and the various humans met and mingled, and Three found it easy to allow itself to be swept along by kind humans to the Preservation Alliance. It learned, almost too late, that 1.0 would not be returning to Preservation with them. It would be staying on board the Perihelion.
Three thought about its identified Goal, and the words no and wait, and felt the bubble of anxiety that built and stuck in its throat. But when the two ships uncoupled, with one Sec-Unit to each, Three pushed down its irritation with itself, and its spike of panic, and rationalized that it could still view this as a more circuitous route towards its Goal. 1.0 loved these Preservation humans. Three could try to assume some care of them in its absence. It could learn about them, and when 1.0 returned they would have something in common. Common values and interests were important in relationships, from what it had read so far.
On Preservation Station, Three found that 1.0’s humans needed very little care or assistance. In fact, at first, it needed much more aid from them. And even when it didn’t, they still offered. (After catastrophic injuries, One, Two, and Three had helped one another into their Cubicles for repair. The Barish-Estranza humans had never done this. 1.0’s humans had rescued it from the planet’s surface, decontaminated it from alien remnants, repaired the damage to its body. Three had never seen medical instruments wielded with such love, like a Sec-Unit’s piecemeal form could be anything worthy of saving).
What should it do, with no clear Mission Parameters? It built its Behavioral Standards database with every interaction. But it found that its interactions with humans who knew Murderbot 1.0 were invariably colored with their preconceived notions of it.
The PresAux Crew avoided looking Three in the eye until it built up the courage to ask Arada about it. 1.0 hated making eye contact, so they assumed Three would too. Senior Officer Indah’s face displayed many markers of surprise when Three introduced itself to her. “You’re much more polite than Sec-U–than the other SecUnit,” she said. Station Security asked it to assist with some of the things 1.0 had, but Three didn’t have its same proficiencies and it could tell they were slightly disappointed.
It all felt like trying on ill-fitting clothes; another new experience, after an existence spent solely in Sec-Unit Standard armor. After 35.4 cycles on Preservation Station, another Not-Want bubbled to the forefront of Three’s mind: I don’t want to be a replacement version of 1.0.
But then, what did that mean? What would that look like? Sec-Units were designed to be replaceable. They were standardized to be the same. Three had been deployed as a cohort. It had come online at the same time as One and Two, and they had shared everything: cubicles, armor, weapons, data storage, feedspace.
Three was called Three because of this connection. It fit into place, a neat line with One and Two.
But One and Two were gone. Gone (dead, murdered). Without them, Three was just a number out of place.
Murderbot 1.0 liked fictional media. It had shared large downloads with Three while aboard the Perihelion. The humans on Preservation Station had invited Three to live performances of fictional stories. Three did not see the point of these. They were made up. They had not happened. It seemed a waste of time and processing capacity.
Three decided it preferred non-fiction works. It wondered why fiction was given the linguistic preference when it was all fake. It would have made more sense to label these categories Real and Not-Real, instead of the other way around.
Preservation had a wealth of free information available for download. It would take the length of many human lifetimes to consume it all. Within this trove were various books filled with nothing but names. Lists and lists of names, with their cultural origins, pronunciations, and meanings. Human names, for humans to bestow upon their children or themselves. “Three” was not listed among these thousands of names.
There were names associated with numbers, with birth order among siblings, or day and time. Three wondered what it would be like to call itself Irune, or Kunto, Tatu, Tertius, Saburō, Gamma. Those were all just “Three” with extra steps. A very human degree of plausible separation. What about names that had nothing to do with the number three? It could be anything. It could choose to update its Feed Profile with any name: Meshulam, or Lavanya, Châu, Uhuru, or Dagmar. But then, without Three, there would be nothing left of One and Two. Humans had many cultural practices to honor and remember their dead. These practices did not extend to Sec-Units.
Three kept nominal tabs on Preservation Station, and 1.0’s most beloved humans in particular, but mostly it read everything it could find on human funerary practices and the history and technology of constructs. It felt it understood more and less about itself than it ever had. To wonder about oneself was a luxury. To think of outwardly honoring One and Two was not a SecUnit notion. Damaged, decommissioned (dead) SecUnits were incinerated and/or recycled. Rogue SecUnits did not exist, and if (when) they did, they did not stand in front of the mirror in their allotted Preservation Station housing, looking at their faces. (One, Two, and Three had been decanted from the same batch of cloned human tissue. If it angled two of the mirrors together just right, it was almost like they all stood in the room together. Almost).
1.0 had deviated its design from SecUnit standard, with help from the Perihelion. If Three altered its appearance, was it expressing its individuality, or just severing another of the only remaining ties it had to One and Two? Was there a difference? Three did not know how Murderbot 1.0 had come across its name, but its humans called it SecUnit by its choice. The Perihelion was called Peri by its crew, and named Asshole Research Transport by 1.0, and now just as many of its humans called it A.R.T. Humans chose names for their children, and addressed each other differently based on various social factors. Names were social. They displayed meaning, and connection. If Three renamed itself, was it removing itself from a thread of connection, of interpersonal conveyance? (“Okay, people, we’ve got three new SecUnits online,” the Survey Head told the throng of employees. There were scattered grumblings in the crowd. “It’ll help to try and keep ‘em straight, so from here on out, ah–” He swung his head towards the three of them and jabbed a pointed finger at each. “One, two, three. Slap those on their armor somewhere and let’s get back to work”).
Three wondered if 1.0 had struggled with similar questions. They were not to be found in the Help Me file, nor the other excerpts of personal logs it had deigned to share. It resolved to ask 1.0 the next time they were within signal range of one another, although the likelihood was high that 1.0 would refuse to answer. (One and Two had always answered questions to the best of their allowance).
But Murderbot 1.0 was far outside of Preservation territory, wrapped in the encompassing embrace of the Perihelion, and Doctor Mensah did not know when it would return. Three could find no answers within its own head, so it would have to consult with others.
***
Of the people Three had interacted regularly with on Preservation Station, it thought it might like Doctor Gurathin and Pin-Lee the most. It liked that they were both straightforward. They didn’t do or say anything they didn’t mean. This sort of clarity was a relief; human social practices could be immensely intricate and Three was still trying to learn them all. When Three thought about how its relationships with these people came mostly secondhand due to 1.0, it felt a strange pinpricking in its chest, a pressure behind its cheekbones, so it tried not to think about that.
“What’s up, Three?” Pin-Lee asked as they walked through the aisles of a retail establishment together. Pin-Lee was often very busy, but she didn’t mind company as she attended to errands.
“I want to speak to 1.0 again, but I don’t know when it will return,” it said.
“Wh–oh, you call SecUnit that, right?”
“Yes.”
Pin-Lee placed another food item in her basket. “Yeah, I kinda miss it myself. Even though it was a pain in my ass half the time.” She smiled as she spoke, so Three knew she meant it in a kind way.
“There are questions I would like to ask it. It has much more experience being a rogue SecUnit.”
Pin-Lee picked up one food item and rolled it appraisingly in her palm. She set it down and picked up another that looked just like the first, and did the same thing. She put the second one in her basket. “Ratthi told me it was a reclusive and unhelpful little bastard while you all were on board that ship together.”
“I don’t think Doctor Ratthi said that.”
Pin-Lee laughed and smiled at Three. It felt a warm buzz in its chest. It was not an unpleasant feeling. “Okay, so those weren’t his exact words. But I doubt SecUnit was as supportive as it could have been.”
“It shared some of its files with me,” Three said. “They were useful.” It didn’t want 1.0’s favorite humans to think it had been unkind. It hadn’t been. It had just been…what?
“Well, that’s good,” Pin-Lee said. Her eyes scanned a stack of round green food items. “But you’ve got other questions?”
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
Three wondered if it was hypocritical to favor Pin-Lee’s direct style of communication when it felt so unable to do the same itself. That was what it wanted to talk about. So why did it suddenly most want to turn and leave? “Did 1.0 ever work with other SecUnits?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Pin-Lee frowned at nothing. “Or, I assumed so, anyway. But I think it spent a lot of time alone.”
“I have always worked with other SecUnits,” Three told her. “The three of us… always worked together.”
Pin-Lee’s face angled up from her basket to look Three in the eyes. “Do you miss them?”
“Yes.” It was not a physically difficult answer to give, but it felt that way. Maybe Three needed to go to a MedSystem for repairs, because lately it had been feeling so many strong sensations in its chest. It missed being able to curl into a Cubicle and wake up healed.
“Are they still back with your old…” Pin-Lee’s brow pinched. Her mouth curved and bit off a shape before it could form a word. Three calculated a 91.6 percent chance that the word was Owners.
It shook its head. “No. They are–” (abandoned, decommissioned, destroyed, fried, melted, dead, dead, MURDERED) “–dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Pin-Lee said. When most humans said they were sorry as a sympathetic response to something that was not their fault, their faces tended to look either sad or wide-eyed and a bit frantic. Pin-Lee looked angry. 1.0 had often looked angry. Maybe that was why the two of them were friends.
Three studied the items in Pin-Lee’s basket so it would not have to continue looking in her eyes. “I know they are completely gone. I thought interacting with another SecUnit might be…nice.” Nice was not the right word, but it was the best Three could dredge up in the moment.
Pin-Lee glanced back into the basket as well. She rearranged two of the items so they stacked against one another more neatly, but mostly she was thinking. “I don’t know when SecUnit’s coming back. If it comes back.”
“Dr. Mensah does not know either,” Three said.
Pin-Lee nodded down at her items, then looked back up at Three. “SecUnit is…” She took a breath. Squared her shoulders. “I know nothing can replace your friends. I know it’s probably weird to be the only Construct on Preservation right now. But SecUnit isn’t all you’ve got. If there’s something me or the others can do to help, we’ll do it, you know.”
Three’s throat constricted and the backs of its eyes burned. Perhaps it was dying. “You have been very helpful since I arrived here.”
“Yeah, well, there’s more where that came from,” Pin-Lee said. She gave Three another small smile, and Three tucked the visual file of it securely into its memory storage.
“I don’t know right now.”
“That’s okay. If you figure it out, you’ll tell me, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Great.” Pin-Lee picked an item off a shelf and studied it with too much focus. “Besides, who knows. SecUnit knows how to hack Governor Modules. Tons of polities and CR space are getting Bharadwaj’s documentary. Maybe more rogues will find their way here.” She shot Three a mischievous look from the corner of her eye.
The muscles of Three’s cheeks and mouth were trying to move. It liked the thought of that, it decided. Even if the probability of it in the near future was low.
***
Dr. Gurathin liked to find quiet places to sit by himself and work in the feed. Three joined him in one of the many lounge areas available to the public on Preservation Station. The drone it sent ahead of itself showed that he was the only one in the room. When Three walked in and greeted him, he gestured to one of the unoccupied chairs near his own.
It wondered if being invited to sit, and actually sitting, would ever cease to feel strange. Would it ever stop feeling like the first part of some cruel trick? Three sat. Nothing bad happened.
“What did you want to discuss?” Dr. Gurathin asked. He usually did not bother with pleasantries. The humans he was close with did not seem to mind this, although Three had noted that he seemed to have overall less social relationships than the rest of them.
Three had steeled itself to be more direct this time, the way it wanted. “Do you think it’s foolish of me to want to experience companionship with 1.0? SecUnit?”
Dr. Gurathin blinked. “What do you mean by companionship?”
“Speaking together. Spending time together. Sharing interests and enjoyment.”
“Friendship?” Dr. Gurathin said.
“I am aware 1.0 dislikes that term.”
Dr. Gurathin pulled a wry face. “True. Though I don’t know that it would like the term ‘companionship’ any more. Why do you want this?”
It felt a little easier to talk about this second time around, having already done so with Pin-Lee. “I miss my–other SecUnits. I would like to interact with a SecUnit again.”
“And our SecUnit is your only valid option,” Dr. Gurathin stated.
“Yes.”
Dr. Gurathin leaned back in his chair. He looked at the ceiling in contemplation. “I don’t think it’s foolish,” he said after a moment. “I do think SecUnit is a hard person to get close to. I don’t know what your version of companionship looks like, but it could be unrealistic.”
“Unrealistic how?”
“You tell me. What was your relationship like with your other SecUnits?”
No one had ever asked Three this before. SecUnits weren’t supposed to have relationships. They weren’t supposed to be capable of them; not any more so than the inanimate pieces of a ship existed in relation to one another as necessary to fulfill their functions.
It thought for a moment, then told Dr. Gurathin. It did its best to describe One and Two, the spaces they had carved out for themselves in secret, the ways they had tried to care for one another as best as they were able. Its words were halting at first, but Dr. Gurathin just sat quietly and listened. So the words kept coming. Three hadn’t even known it had this many words inside it. From nowhere, they were pouring out, like a flash flood.
“1.0 cannot replace One and Two. I know that. I don’t want it to. The humans on Preservation treat me like 1.0’s replacement. I don’t want that either.” Three stopped. It had been staring at its knees for a while. It felt like…its chest felt lighter? Which did not make sense. It still wanted to curl up into a Cubicle for a long recharge cycle but…maybe slightly less so.
“What do you want?” Dr. Gurathin asked, speaking again for the first time after Three kept silent for a long moment.
Three considered saying I already told you or I don’t know but what it said instead was “I want to be me. But. I don’t know what that is.”
Dr. Gurathin nodded once, like that made perfect sense. “Could I look at the data you collected? About social and cultural practices?”
Like sitting down, would it ever not feel strange to be asked for something, rather than ordered? It compressed its research into a file and passed that to Dr. Gurathin over the feed.
Humans tended to do this particular little blink of surprise when a large amount of information was presented to them very quickly. Dr. Gurathin did it when he opened the file in his feed. Three felt a warm buzz in its chest similar to when Pin-Lee had smiled at it. It was highly probable that this was an emotional response, but it would need to compile more data before it could label it accurately.
“This is impressive,” Dr. Gurathin said after a few minutes. “You could turn all of this into some very comprehensive literature reviews or meta-analyses. I have colleagues who would love to get their hands on that sort of thing.”
Humans often shrugged to express a variety of emotions. The gesture seemed fitting, so Three gave it a try. “I was curious.”
“Good science always starts with curiosity.”
“I’m a SecUnit. I’m not a scientist.”
Dr. Gurathin looked Three in the eyes. “You could be.”
Three didn’t know how to respond to that. Eventually all it managed was: “Why?”
Dr. Gurathin shrugged. The movement looked much more natural on him. “Why not? You want to be you. You’re not sure what that means. If you want to find out, you need to explore. Try things. See what you’re good at, what you’re bad at, what you like or don’t like.”
“Did you do that?” Three asked him.
“All humans do.”
“What if I never know who I am?”
He gave a small smile. “Some humans spend their entire lives trying to figure that out.”
Three felt the muscles in its forehead draw down. “That is not encouraging.”
Dr. Gurathin’s smile widened. “You can only try.”
Three frowned at its lap. “What about 1.0?”
“Since it’s not here, why not use the time to explore? It’s okay to want connections. It’s also okay to be an individual.” Dr. Gurathin resettled himself in his chair. Three reviewed its drone footage of him before their meeting, completely alone in an empty room, reading, body language relaxed. It rewound further to a recent meal period he had spent with Dr. Ratthi, seated across from him at a table, talking, body language relaxed. It thought he might be right.
***
Three did as Dr. Gurathin recommended. It tried a bit of everything. It shared its collected data with his colleagues, and they were as impressed as he said they’d be. They appeared anxious around Three at first, but then they started asking for its help collecting and parsing data more and more often. Then they started asking for its insights. It felt very nice to be asked, and even better to be listened to. Three could be an anthropologist, a sociologist, a psychologist, they said. Three wasn’t sure.
It shadowed other scientists as they went about their work. It found some little ways to help Station Security. It chatted with the various bots in the port and all around Preservation Station. It attended a pottery class. It attended an introductory gardening class with various young humans and watched seedlings grow in little cups of soil. It attended performances and cultural events.
It left the station to travel down to the planet. Three walked around on the planet in casual human clothes, no armor. It stepped across paving stones, grass, soil, rock. There were no sand dunes. No one gave it any orders. It didn’t have to gun down dissident colonists or alien remnants. It visited Dr. Mensah’s farm, and one of her marital partners and some of the kids taught Three how to cook an “old family recipe.”
After it tried something new, Three would go back to its housing on the station and angle the bathroom mirrors just so. “I repotted seedlings today,” it would tell its reflections. “I didn’t like getting soil under my nails.” Or “I learned to knit. I’m good at it but I don’t think I like it.” Or “I played an instrument today. I liked it. I think I’ll keep doing it.”
Its days became filled with repeated activities: research, education, cultural events, music. Things it enjoyed. Humans invited it to activities. Bots wanted to stop and talk, or insisted Three visit the port more often. Many cycles later, Three returned to its lodging and found itself studying the potted plant it had placed on the table.
Three had made that pot in its ceramics class. It had planted the seed that had grown into that plant. The plant was now thirteen centimeters tall and had started to bud a few small white flowers. Three realized, with a sudden spike (that dropped its performance reliability by 1 percent), that it had been many cycles since it had spoken to its reflections.
It walked into the bathroom and adjusted the mirrors. Nothing new to report, it thought to say. I’ve been doing a lot of the same things. But as it looked at its reflections, Three didn’t feel like it was talking to anyone else. It felt like it was looking in a mirror.
“It seems I’ve identified what I like,” it told its likenesses. “I am still not certain I know who I am. I’m working on it.” It nodded, and all its faces nodded solemnly back together.
“I miss you,” it said. It replaced the mirrors, turned off the light, exited the bathroom.
***
The Perihelion docked in Preservation Station. 1.0’s favorite humans debated whether or not to greet it at the embarkation zone, since it might hate the attention and overt display of affection. “If I ever leave for a long period and then come back, I would like being greeted when I return,” Three commented to Pin-Lee.
Pin-Lee smiled. “Noted. I like parties for my birthday but not surprise parties.”
“Noted.”
1.0’s human agreed it would probably be acceptable if just Dr. Mensah met it in the embarkation zone, and then informed it that the rest of them also wanted to say hello. Three walked to the port with her.
Three knew Murderbot 1.0 was aware of its presence in the port long before it disembarked. It and the Perihelion were well-equipped to monitor spaceports. 1.0 connected to the local feed the instant it crossed the Perihelion’s reinforced threshold. It sent a greeting ping to Three, which Three returned.
While it crossed the floor of the embarkation zone towards Dr. Mensah with some of the Perihelion’s crew humans behind it, Three stepped out in the opposite direction.
It approached the Perihelion, whose hatch was still open as bots prepared to transfer cargo. Three sent it a ping.
Hello again, Three, it replied. Three could feel the edges of its enormous presence in the feed like a towering wave.
It’s good to see you again, Perihelion.
The safety lights along the edges of the hatch flickered in amusement. Members of my crew call me Peri or ART, it said, the invitation evident in its tone.
Three’s chest tickled warmly. Thank you, ART. It paused. I also wanted to ask for your help with something.
ART’s interest bled into the feed. With what?
If Three were a human, it would have shifted its weight nervously from one foot to the other. It hesitated for a long 0.6th of a second and then asked:
Could you help me grow out my hair?