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SecUnits are not supposed to have panic attacks. But I do lots of things SecUnits aren’t supposed to do, so what’s fucking new?
I hadn’t expected it to feel like this when Mensah, Pin-Lee, Amena, Arada, Ratthi, Overse, and everyone else from Preservation had left to go home. But I was on ART, which was good, with Three, which was bewildering, and with ART’s humans, which alternated between being okay and being terrifying.
It was the middle of the night cycle. I had gone offline for a recharge cycle. I came online at only 97% charge, which was highly irregular. I also came online in an elevated, hyper-aroused state, which was also highly irregular. Well, normally it would’ve been, but this was the third restart in a row that had gone like this.
I started manually adjusting my systems, reining in the hyperventilation, slowing down my vascular pump. ART asked me, SecUnit, what happened?
It had probably noticed that I came online and immediately lost my shit, which is the problem with having an omniscient ship that you live on for a best friend. It’s nothing, I’m dealing with it, I said.
ART started playing the theme song to Sanctuary Moon in the feed, as it began bombarding me with suggestions. Have you showered recently? Would you like to do a trauma treatment module? That kind of thing.
It’s fine, I told it impatiently. I could slow down my vascular pump and directly control my respiration, but my stupid organic parts had already dumped a flood of stress chemicals into my blood which had me sweating and trembling. I had this nagging sense that something was wrong, but I couldn’t pin down what it was.
Then I heard the knock on my door.
I should’ve known that it seemed too easy to get ART to lay off me.
I caught the ping and I knew it was Three.
I could tell it to go away, but then it would spend the next cycle looking disappointed at me. Guilt-tripping was Three’s governor module approved means of getting humans to go along with things they didn’t want to do, and it was unnervingly good at it.
Come in, I told it.
Three let itself in, quietly locking my cabin door behind itself. After it shut the door, it said, “Perihelion told me that you had an anomalous restart.”
I said, “Every restart cycle is anomalous when you have a busted governor module.”
Three was not impressed. “You’re sweaty,” it said. “Is your adrenaline elevated?”
“I cut it off,” I said. “It’s falling.”
I could already feel the stress hormone slowly leaving my bloodstream, and the empty, exhausted feeling it left behind.
Three knelt next to my bunk, so it was eye-level with my head on the pillow. I had to look away from it. It said, “I have had anomalous restarts since I hacked my governor module. Every time.”
I didn’t know what to say. It sounded exhausting.
“May I hold your hand?” It asked.
I considered saying no. I wanted to. But the whole reason Three had come here, obviously, was to try to comfort me, and if I didn’t let it do that, it would get all dejected again. I unlaced my hands from where I had clasped them together over my chest as I lay on my back, and let the arm on Three’s side of me fall, palm up, hanging over the side of the bunk.
Three grasped it in both of its own hands. I could tell on contact that our hands were exactly the same size, which I knew should be the case because SecUnits have a standard body plan configuration for identification purposes. But it was still somehow a little surprising, because I had only ever held Dr. Mensah’s hand like this before, and her hand was so much smaller.
Its skin was warm and dry, a stark contrast to my own clammy hand. With its thumbs it gently massaged my palm and the inside of my wrist. I wasn’t watching it, but I closed my eyes anyway.
It changed its grip, intertwining the fingers of one hand with mine, gently running the other hand up my arm, its thumb tracing the edge of my gunport up my forearm without any hesitation. I couldn’t help but think of that meeting with Mensah in the ready room, when she first saw all of me without the armor or my clothing. The way her eyes had skipped over my wounds and my inorganic parts to focus on my face.
My humans were good, and they cared. This was why I liked them. Still, like all humans, they tended to avoid looking at my inorganic parts, or stared at them with a vaguely guilty expression.
I hated when humans saw my inorganic parts. Three was like me though, and my gunport was entirely unremarkable to it. Somehow, that made it okay.
Having reached the crook of my elbow, it drew its hand back down along my forearm, its palm ghosting over the seam of my closed gunport, its fingertips brushing down my organic flesh. Involuntarily, I shuddered and swallowed.
I watched through one of ART’s cameras as Three lifted my hand just a little, then ducked its head and kissed my knuckles.
It wasn’t wet and gross, like kisses looked in my serials sometimes. Its lips were dry and rough as though they were slightly chapped, and it was more like it brushed them against my fingers more than anything else.
A jealous part of me wondered if it had ever done this with SecUnits One and Two. Then I realized the thought was absolutely insane. I clamped down on an urge to laugh, exhaling through my nose.
“What’s funny?” Three asked quietly.
I opened my eyes and turned my head to side to look at Three. Somehow it was easier than looking at humans, in this moment. As I did, Three dropped its own eyes to its lap. I said, “I was thinking about how the governor module would hate this.”
Three squeezed my hand, its nails minutely pressing into my skin. “It would.”
I couldn’t put into words what felt so taboo to me about this. I was not injured or in need of repair or assistance. (The only thing that wasn’t fully functioning was my brain. But that was par for the course.) It was a touch without purpose.
Three asked, “Can I join you?” Its eyes flicking toward my feet on the bunk.
“Okay,” I said. I still felt a little unsettled in my body, the persistent anxiety hanging over me.
For some reason, I expected Three to sit at the end of my bunk, instead of what it actually did which was crawl over me. As its body passed over mine, I clamped down a sudden instinctual fear that it was about to attack me and overpower me, freezing my own body in place, heel pressed into the mattress, staring toward the ceiling. Rationally, I knew Three would never do that–and it wasn’t stupid enough to do that while aboard ART, but it was a survival reflex, worn deep.
Three settled itself between me and the wall, laying on its side, its arm extended over my chest, its hand cupping my shoulder. “Is this okay?” It asked.
I had to unfreeze my body to answer. “Yes.” I wasn’t sure why it was okay, but I didn’t want Three to leave.
It ducked its head against mine. I could feel some of its hair brushing my forehead, soft but tickly, the bridge of its nose pressed against my cheek.
It was breathing slowly and deeply, and I synced my own to its pattern. It had increased its body heat, and it was radiating into me, warming me.
I could feel the inorganic part of its knee joint brushing against my low thigh, smooth and cooler than its organic parts, but still warmed by the ambient heat of its body.
I wasn’t sure why I was okay with this. If a human tried to do this to me, even a human like Mensah, I would’ve considered throwing myself (or the human) out through the airlock. But maybe it was because Three was a SecUnit, and I had never had the chance to think about my opinion on SecUnits touching me in non-combat situations before.
“Do you like this?” I asked Three.
“I think so,” It answered softly, shifting slightly closer to me. Due to my configuration change, its legs reached further down the bed than mine. It had agreed to let ART give it a configuration change, but it wanted to wait until we arrived at the university, when the humans would leave ART to stay at their quarters on the station. I understood the feeling. “I feel safe, knowing you’re here.”
“Why?” I asked. It was the one that had saved my ass, not the other way around. I’d never tried to hurt it or anything, but I couldn’t figure out why ‘not actively hostile’ took the incredible leap to ‘safe’ in its eyes.
“I’m not alone,” it answered. I felt it stroke my shoulder, its fingers slowly curling and uncurling. “Do you like this?” It countered.
“I don’t know,” I said, “But I don’t want you to stop, exactly.”
The gentleness it touched me with was completely foreign, and it was a little frightening. No one had ever touched me like this before. Maybe what frightened me was the fact that I couldn’t go back to not knowing what this was like.
“I hate the anomalous restarts,” Three said.
“Me too.”
Coming online with the sense that something was wrong was unsettling, and the feeling of dread seemed to hang over me for hours. But as we lay there, the feeling started to slowly drain from me.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Three propped itself up on its elbow, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. I politely ignored how Three trembled against me as it did it.