Work Text:
I don’t actually care what my clients are doing at any particular moment. I just need to know. Humans seem to have difficulty understanding this distinction. I would have been happier not knowing about all the time they spent on hygiene, nutritional intake and output, swapping bodily fluids and leaking emotions. But that data informed my risk and threat assessment modules. Without it, my processes were at risk of constantly ticking over into ever-increasing agitation. It was distracting and irritating, like a human supervisor interrupting you with pointless comments every four minutes while you’re trying to watch a premium quality serial.
Yes, I’d tried code patches. Calendar inputs and routine behavioral patterns didn’t help. If the data wasn’t current, then my systems refused to trust its accuracy, spinning off even more processes like one of those repetitive songs Mensah’s youngest offspring seem to find engaging. I recognized my own data inputs, so looping old footage wasn’t an option. It was nice to know that my systems were difficult to subvert in this way, or it would have been if it wasn’t also a source of constant annoyance with my humans.
My augmented human handled it even worse. Possibly because, with his vision augments, he was far more likely to notice my drones (Dr. Gurathin identified on my drones 23% of the time, while the others hovered between 8% (Dr. Mensah) and 2% (Dr. Ratthi)). Or perhaps it was because he was a paranoid little weirdo.
(Note the inclusion of the word “little”. I have also been described as a “paranoid weirdo”, but since I am in the top 5% of the human height range for Preservation Alliance humans, I cannot accurately be called “little”.)
During previous incidents, Dr. Gurathin had messaged me over the feed with his objections, asking that I retrieve the identified drone and not use it to re-infiltrate his personal living space. Luckily, Mensah had bought me two cases of drones, so I was able to use a different one for each new infiltration, adhering to his request.
This time, he had unexpectedly dropped a container of hot liquid over the drone. It was still functional (a drone that couldn’t handle water would be useless for planetside deployments) but the audio was muted and its visual inputs were restricted to the interior of a First Landing University mug. I could probably push the mug off the furniture surface using the drone’s propulsion system, but I was getting a 99.2% risk assessment that this action would cause mug to break. That had an 84.6% chance of turning this incident from a minor annoyance into a Big Fucking Deal involving meetings and consensus and talking about this, ugh.
Instead, I walked over to Gurathin’s residence and hacked his door open before stepping inside. He was sitting on his couch reading a book and didn’t bother to look up as I strode through the apartment, lifted the mug and retrieved my drone.
(Not even a tablet, a physical book like the ones in really old historical entertainment serials. Turns out Preservation’s fixation on handmade items extended to media, and there was a niche industry in First Landing dedicated to producing these archaic devices. I’d dismissed the whole concept, until Pin-lee mentioned that some of the stories were exclusive to those physical copies and didn’t exist anywhere on the feed. That was both strange and intriguing, and I’d made a note to do further research the next time I had to be on the (ugh) planet.)
I had almost escaped from this humiliating little ritual when Gurathin spoke in that quiet, unsettling voice of his. “One of things I cherish most about Preservation is the existence of true privacy. That I can have moments that exist only in the moment, not recorded or observed or analyzed. That are mine and mine alone.”
“Your augments have a recording function,” I relied, not turning to look at him.
“Which I can turn off.”
“I can’t turn off my function.”
Gurathin turned a page on his book, still not looking up at me. Which is what I had asked for, but it was still a little strange to have my requests respected. He was so good about it, in fact, that I wondered if maybe he’d coded a proximity alarm into his visual augments to alert on me. “Then it seems we are at an impasse.”
That sounded portentous, like something a character in a media serial would say right before the plot really got going. Wait, did I mean portentous or prophetic? Were those the same things? Anyway, it made my threat assessment module twitch, so I left.
After several cycles of my processes gradually winding themselves up in irritating ways, I realized I needed to take a different approach. Gurathin didn’t object to my drones when he spotted them in public areas, or even in private spaces he was sharing with other humans. It was only when no other humans were present that he found the drones upsetting.
(Which was stupid, because solitude was a peak risk vector for humans and augmented humans. Injury without witnesses carried a higher probability of negative outcomes due to delayed recovery and treatment.)
I’d been using the drones for all my humans and augmented human because it was the most versatile approach. Being mobile meant I could adjust them as needed to achieve the optimal angle for each situation. But mobility did come with a trade-off in concealment capabilities.
Residential spaces on stations weren’t as cramped as transport vessel cabins, but they were still more constrained than planet-side habitations. Gurathin’s apartment had a larger main room with two smaller rooms for sleeping and hygiene functions. I mapped out the unit and did an analysis to determine the optimal camera placement for complete coverage of the space from static locations. Then I converted five of my drones into smaller units with self-charging power sources. Giving up that many drones was hard, but not as hard as listening to my own brain complain about not knowing if my augmented human was safe.
Then I checked Gurathin’s calendar for a time when he would be away from his dwelling for six hours, got visual confirmation of his departure, and headed over to install my network. It wouldn’t take me nearly that long, but my agitated processes were irritating, and I wanted them resolved as quickly as possible. Besides, the extra time would also give me a chance to establish an alibi.
I started to hack his door when I realized it wasn’t on the feed. That was, huh. I did a quick scan to confirm that all the other living quarters in this section had feed-active locks. Preservation has all those strange ideas about openness and trusting people. Maybe Gurathin had decided to stop locking his door? That was a dumb decision, and I’d have to fix it for him. I tried to reconnect his door to the feed when I realized this was dumber than I’d anticipated.
His door was completely feed-inert. I couldn’t reconnect it to the feed because there was nothing inside to connect. At all. It was baffling.
I stepped back and compared my current visual to the archived image of the front door I’d effortlessly hacked three days ago. This wasn’t the same door. It looked similar, but the hinge shape was slightly different and there was now a metal rectangle on the front, about 10 cm wide and 20 cm high. A round indent was set onto the metal’s surface, 6 cm in diameter with a 1.5 cm indent in the center.
I bent over to stare at the indent. I could see more metal inside, an array of differently shaped pins and levers. The mechanism inside was also feed-inert. Whatever this was depended entirely on its physical components for functionality.
A quick search of my security module identified it as a manual lock. The data was stored in a file area I had never previously accessed. It was outdated and ridiculous.
It was not going to stop me.
My module contained a brief overview of the construction of such locks and several techniques for opening them. The required tools would have been simple to create in a recycler, except Preservation Station didn’t have many recyclers that were open-access. I could use the one in the council offices, but that would involve explaining to Dr. Mensah what I was making and why I needed them. I was fairly certain that conversation was not going to go in my favor.
Fortunately, I happen to carry an assortment of metal parts around with me at all times. I studied the diagrams in my module and cross-referenced them against my schematics, identifying several small components of my feet that could be detached with relative ease and should allow me to pick the lock’s mechanism.
This plan seemed completely logical at the time. Given that it led to me being confronted by Gurathin in front of his door, bootless, poking at his door lock with what was technically my feet, it clearly was not.
“Another unusual thing about Preservation is that neighbors watch out for one another,” he said, gazing at the circle of dried flora on a nearby door. “Janice called me, but I honestly thought her description was exaggerated.”
I slipped the detached parts of my feet into a pocket (I was pretty sure I could walk without them) and shuffled into my boots. “This is ridiculous.”
“Something we can both agree on, at last.”
“Why won’t you just let me keep you safe?”
ART does this thing when it’s upset that makes it sound terrifying, so that you immediately want to stop doing whatever it was that made it upset and also wish you could invent time-travel so that you could go back and never have done it in the first place. It’s irritating but effective. I need to figure out how to do that, because instead of sounding like someone who should be respected and listened to, I sounded like a small, sticky human.
Gurathin pulled a key out of his pocket and moved past me to open his door. He did this slowly enough that I was able to get a good, clear image of the design on the key, which would make replicating it fairly simple. Stepping inside, he gestured for me to follow him.
(I was wrong about the feet. It turns out those were load-bearing tiny pieces, or something, and I almost bumped against the doorframe and had to hop into the room on one leg. Because what this situation needed was that extra little sprinkle of humiliation.)
“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing to his sofa. He pulled over one of the chairs that went with his food table and sat down opposite me, looking somewhere around my left hand. “Why the fuck are you doing this?”
That caught me off-guard. Not the question, but the profanity. Gurathin was on the low end of my fucks chart, and it only became part of his speech patterns when he was significantly frustrated. (That was common for most humans. I really hoped it wasn’t true for Pin-lee, or she might be at risk of stress-induced health issues, considering her clear leadership spot on the fucks chart.)
“It’s my function.”
“Define this function for me.”
“I am a SecUnit. My function is to keep my clients safe.”
“Define safe.”
I wanted to roll my eyes, but I restrained myself. “Alive. Unharmed. Unkidnapped. Unaffected by any of the many, many ways that squishy humans can wind up dead.”
“Define unharmed.”
“Not harmed.”
“That’s a broad definition. Too broad to really be useful,” Gurathin said. “Are you responsible if I give myself a paper cut?”
“No,” I said, automatically. “Yes.”
“What about if I decide to go jogging and twist my ankle accidentally?”
“No,” I said. Then, “yes.”
“Under this definition, do you have sole responsibility for your client’s physical wellbeing?”
I knew he was going somewhere with this. The conversation was building towards a structured probing I’d seen him employ in systems analysis, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to. “No. Yes.”
“Your clients have no personal responsibility for their own physical safety?”
“Yes.” A half-second later, “no.”
“Your clients lack the autonomy to define and be responsible for their own physical safety?”
“No.” I stopped, considering the question again. “No. Clients must always be afforded personal autonomy, within the scope of mission parameters and other top-level regulations.”
“Am I a client?”
I checked my tags. Gurathin had a lot of them, from [augmented] to [soft quiet smile] to [disliked], but one was [client]. “Yes.”
“Then as a client, I would like to use my autonomy to define safe as it relates to me.”
Scanning my processes for objections took 1.28 minutes. Changing definitions can lead to systems glitches, and I wanted to be sure this wasn’t going to interfere with my ability to do my job at some future point when I was actually doing my job (rather than just being twitchy and a little bored). Gurathin waited silently for me to finish. “That is appropriate within my function.”
He glanced briefly at my face before shifting his focus to the wall behind my right shoulder. “Safety, for client=Gurathin, requires periods of unobserved time up to but not exceeding eight hours. This is mandated to fulfill psychological well-being requirements of the client.”
I could feel my cycling processes pause and then shut down as his definition slotted into my programming. For the first time in cycles, I felt calm. Okay, as calm as a rogue Murderbot can feel. But that itchy sensation of needing to know the second-by-second status of Gurathin stilled.
“That was weird,” I said.
“I’ll document the process for everyone else,” he said, standing and carrying his chair back towards the food area.
“Nobody else seems to mind,” I replied, pulling off my boot and starting to re-attach the missing parts of my feet. I didn’t really feel like hopping all the way back to Mensah’s office.
“It’s not for them,” Gurathin said, carefully looking over my head. “It’s for you. There must be better things you could be doing with those processing cycles.”
Huh. He wasn’t wrong about that. And weird as this conversation had been, it was also sort of nice. He’d come up with a solution that took into account what I actually am, rather than continuing to fix the situation like humans or augmented humans would. It gave me a strange organic sensation that I was absolutely not going to investigate further.
“That definition may be overridden in the event of an emergency mandate,” I said, flexing my toes to be sure I’d put everything back in the right spot. “I reserve the right to barge in if you’re being attacked or something.”
“Of course. I’ll get you a key.”
Six months later, I had almost completed my evidence retrieval mission for ART when I found myself facing the last, stupid obstacle: the data clip we needed had been secured behind, of all things, a manual lock.
Curious. Although antiquated, this could present a significant obstacle to an infiltration team unprepared to manage such primitive devices. ART said through the feed. Do you need me to research override techniques?
“I got it,” I said as I toed off my boots and got to work. “Just promise me that Gurathin will never hear about this.”