Work Text:
None of this would have happened if I’d stayed on board ART like a reasonable person. I didn’t need to disembark onto the station; the few things I wanted to purchase could have been ordered over the feed for delivery, the same way ART got all its supplies. And yes, there were a couple of items I wanted to inspect for myself so that I could make an informed decision between two options, but really I could’ve just ordered both and then returned the one I didn’t like as much. This station wasn’t part of the Corporate Rim, so the return policies of the various shops weren’t standardized, but that also meant they were a little more consumer-friendly, since they were all in competition with each other, and while—anyway. The point is, I didn’t need to be on the station in the first place.
So it was 100% my own stupid fault when I rounded a corner in the electronics wing of the station’s main commercial center and almost shut myself down because there was a Company SecUnit there.
For a minute, I was back there: As vividly as if it were really happening, I tasted copper in my mouth, felt the clenching pain crawling down my muscles. I was held in the grip of the governor module, of their control over me. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t get myself out; I was nothing.
I’m not sure what I actually did; I lost my grasp on the station’s cameras that I’d been surfing through, and my own drones went into an emergency holding pattern. When I remembered that I had a physical body that I really needed to keep from being noticed, I found myself standing face-to-face with a wall. I could have passed it off as reading the advertising materials that had been posted there, except my eyes were only about six inches away, and very few humans can process anything at such close range.
Fuck, I was fucking this up. They were going to notice me, my configuration was still so similar that they were bound to realize what I was, I was acting so weird that even the stupidest human would know that I wasn’t real, I was going to end up back there , I was—I couldn’t—
ART, help, I stuttered into the feed.
My organic systems were throwing up a wave of error messages faster than I could clear them: Respiration rate elevated; fluid circulation rate elevated; dangerous levels of cortisol in system; dangerous levels of adrenaline in system; respiration approaching emergency threshold—
What happened? ART came thundering into my feed, so overwhelming and familiar that everything slid sideways for a moment before stabilizing. Why are your stats falling like that? It had been riding my feed as I moved through the station but only with 0.002% of its attention, as this was a boring fucking errand that should not have resulted in anything like me shutting down in the middle of a corridor next to a fucking Company SecUnit .
Less than 0.00001 seconds later, I could sense ART in the station feed. Unfortunately, ART was a huge bully who didn’t know how to gently make friends with a system, so it had just ripped control of the entire station out of Station Sys’s hands and was crushing Station Sys into a black box almost as an afterthought while it rifled through the cameras to find me.
You are going to be fine, ART said forcefully. Nothing will happen to you. They don’t even realize you are there.
Sure enough, the Company SecUnit had stalked right past me, its helmeted head not turning even half a degree to the side as it moved past the spot where I stood, still stupidly staring at a wall. (That was irrelevant; I knew the exact angle at which its peripheral vision was effective and I was definitely within the range of its vision.)
They’re here, I said stupidly. Why. Why are they.
Unimportant. ART said. They have nothing to do with you. Come back.
Where—
To me, little idiot.
No, I said, annoyed—and weirdly, that annoyance made it possible for me to snap my eyes away from the corridor I’d watched the Company SecUnit turn down. Where is—which way should I go? I . . . I don’t remember the best route. Somehow I’d accidentally deleted my map of the station. I could download it from the feed again but I’d also locked down all my connections except the one with ART and I felt weirdly anxious about opening any of them again.
A moment later a highlighted route appeared in my visual overlay, leading me down a side corridor that would bypass the busiest commercial areas in this sector and bring me to the main elevators that connected this level with the private embarkation zone. After a minute of regrouping (it turned out I had locked all my joints, to who knows what end, and I had to carefully release them all one by one), I was able to follow it.
Once I was moving, I felt a little better—at least I wasn’t trapped there in that hallway. On the other hand, the first Company SecUnit had come out of nowhere, and I had no idea how many were here or what they were doing or when I might run into another one. I had my drones scouting up ahead and covering the area behind me and I still had to force myself not to keep swiveling my head around to check with my actual eyes that there wasn’t a Company unit behind every commercial kiosk and inside every storefront I passed.
ART was aggressively up in my feed, asking a bunch of questions about shit that it already knew because it had access to all my stats and drone camera data. I knew it was trying to distract me / stop me from freaking out about the stupid Company, as if I was a panicking human. Even more annoying, it was sort of working.
I know what you’re doing, ART, I told it.
And? The way ART could make a single word drip with sarcasm was actually pretty impressive.
It’s so stupid, I grumbled.
What, your desire to deny needing any kind of assistance with managing stress in an objectively stressful situation? I agree.
That was doubly annoying because I couldn’t find anything to reply to it that didn’t make me sound like an idiot. I settled for oh, fuck off, and gave ART the latest piece of irrelevant information it had demanded.
There is only one Company ship docked with this station, ART informed me.
How do you know? We didn’t see any in the public directory.
It was registered under a shell name. This is common practice for corporate ships docking at non-corporate polities; technically they are allowed to interface with collectives outside their corporate sphere, but the paperwork involved is so burdensome that most corporates just dock under a fake name so they can pretend it never happened.
I got to the elevator hub and got into the queue for the next elevator going up to the embarkation zone. Okay, but if it’s under a fake name, how do you know there aren’t more?
I’m in the station system. ART probably could have said “I am the station system,” the way it had shoved poor StationSys aside. I have access to data that isn’t available on the public feed.
Does that extra data indicate what they’re doing here? My Act Like a Human Code shifted my weight from one foot to the other and made me look around the elevator hub in that stupid way humans do, like the elevator will arrive faster if you’re watching for it. Ordinarily, it would feel humiliating, doing shit like this, but right now it felt reassuring, a confirmation that I was still free, that nobody had detected what I was.
The purpose they submitted is incredibly vague, ART said. “Resupply and communication.”
That could be anything. The elevator dinged and I took a step forward with the other people who were waiting for it.
I am showing an 89% probability that the corporate supervisors want to get drunk and utilize ComfortUnits.
The elevator doors opened.
There were four Company SecUnits inside the elevator.
I actually physically stumbled and one of my drones smacked into a wall. Fortunately, the humans and augmented humans were equally surprised / unhappy to see a bunch of murder constructs in their elevator, so maybe it didn’t totally give me away?
But then they started to get on the elevator anyway. And I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, which was to run at top speed in the opposite direction, because that’s not something a normal, unsuspicious human does on seeing a SecUnit. But I also couldn’t get onto the elevator. Because I just couldn’t.
Move , ART sent, with high priority. You are running out of time.
I can’t do this.
You can . You have to.
ART tapped my feed again, this time with priority:critical, and somehow, I lifted one foot off the floor.
I took a step, then another. Then I was on the elevator. I turned around and faced the doors like humans do, and the SecUnits were behind me, and I couldn’t see them, even in my periphery.
ART pushed a camera view of the elevator into my feed, and then I could at least see them. They were wearing the same armor that I used to wear. One of them had a long scratch across its visor. They were standing in the ready for action stance that I had spent hours standing in. I could still feel that stance in my organic parts, a deep familiar ache in the muscles and joints.
This whole time, ART was also spamming my feed with requests for diagnostics, one after another, each with slightly different parameters, so that I had to run each one separately. Responding to the constant flurry of requests for information that ART already had access to was taking up nearly 68% of my processing power, which only left me a sliver to overanalyze every millisecond of identical footage of the four SecUnits still just standing there not doing anything.
My respiration had increased past the safe threshold, but it felt like I wasn’t getting any oxygen at all. Between the alerts flashing across my visual field and the black crawling darkness at the corners of my eyes I couldn’t see anything; I fixed my eyes straight ahead of me and hoped there wasn’t anything I needed to see.
I can’t do it, I sent to ART. I’m going to— I didn’t know what I was going to do. Scream. Shut down involuntarily. Kill everyone on the elevator.
You’re almost there, ART said. Hang on.
I could feel my hands shaking. I tried to lock down the joints so they couldn’t move, but the process glitched and failed twice, and I gave up.
The SecUnits moved toward me as one.
I recoiled away from them, smacking my head against the wall of the elevator, wrenching my ankle as I tripped over my own damn feet.
NO
Before I had even registered what it had said, ART was already in my systems, breaking through my walls like they were nothing . It wasn’t like before, when it had asked, or at least demanded, to be let in—it was just there suddenly, taking control of my energy weapons, taking control of motor functions, taking control of vocal, taking control of respiration, fuck there was going to be nothing left of me.
I was so scared of the Company. But right now maybe I was more scared of ART.
Then ART was gone, and the SecUnits were stepping out of the elevator onto the second embarkation zone, and the doors were closing again, and the other people on the elevator were shuffling around to fill in the space they had left, and I was half crouched on the floor in the corner.
And my energy weapons hadn’t deployed.
I’d sent the command to deploy them—or rather, I was already deploying them, at the speed of my every panicked instinct. I wouldn’t have had time to shut down the order, even if my brain was working well enough to realize what a monumentally suicidal an idea it would be to get my energy weapons out with four Company SecUnits watching. Before I would’ve been able to cancel the command, they would have already been out, and everything would have been over.
But ART had had time.
“Heh, I’m a little nervous of them, too,” one of the humans said. He grinned, offering me a hand up. “Fucking creepy zombie-bots.”
I knew I should take his hand. But I was pretty sure if anyone touched me, I was going to lose it. I pushed to my feet and faced the front of the elevator again, my teeth clenched.
“It’s fucked up that the corporations use them to police real people,” the human was continuing, not minding my rudeness, or maybe oblivious to it. “My boss ever tries to put one of those zombies in charge of me, I’ll show him where he can stick it. The idea of letting a skin-bot tell you what to do . . .” He put his opinions into a wet-sounding organic noise. It was a stupid risk, but I dialed my hearing down. I just couldn’t deal with that right now.
The elevator was moving again. I checked that I was running my Act Like a Human Code. I manually pulled my respiratory respiratory rate back down to a suboptimal but not disastrous level. I checked my camera view and confirmed that no humans or augmented humans were staring at me.
I’m sorry that I had to do that. ART’s presence in my feed was very distant, almost nothing more than text.
I didn’t know what I wanted to say to it. I checked my walls again, then realized that it could definitely tell I was doing it. I didn’t know how I felt about it watching me check the wall it had just completely ignored.
But you’re not sorry that you did it, I said finally. I didn’t need to make it a question.
I am not. ART was quiet for 0.42 seconds. If you had deployed your energy weapons, the Company units would have identified you. You would have ended up back in the Company’s hands, and I am not willing to let that happen to you.
You should have let me choose, I wanted to say. But I knew there hadn’t been time for me to choose, and if ART had tried to leave me the choice, I would be in a Company transport crate by now. ART had read the situation 100% accurately, and it had made the one play that ended up with me still free and alive.
I still didn’t know if I agreed with its choice.
Maybe that was what it was like to be something like ART—such an immensely powerful being that you essentially always make the decisions for everyone around you. To be able to actually do what you wanted, with no one really to answer to unless you chose to let yourself care what they thought. To know that you were doing something they would hate, and to do it anyway because your enormous brain knew it was the best thing even if they didn’t see it.
A shudder ran through me, and not just because of the huge amounts of leftover cortisol and adrenaline and whatever fucking else was still churning through my system.
Whatever, I said finally. I was too tired for this. Just get me back to my room. I need a fucking shutdown.