Chapter Text
They were supposed to go home, the next day.
They didn’t, of course; nothing had worked out how it should’ve, and that was life in Corporation Rim.
Well, Ratthi would go, soonest – he would be dying of boredom waiting for something to happen and had some sort of fungus to check on in his hobby lab that would be far more exciting, Gurathin knew distantly. And Arada… and Pin-Lee, too, of course… would decide eventually that a little space from each other, to let themselves breathe and think alone, might help them grow together again.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, Gurathin thought that morning. The cheap pillow under his head was damp from his too-ready tears, that had coursed down his cheeks for the rest of that first night. Pin-Lee would stay with Mensah, without a doubt. Their legal skills (and, more frankly, the eager and boundless tenacity that they shared with organisms who had larger jaws and smaller brains and a few dozen kilograms more bite-strength) would be needed in the weeks and months to follow, to battle GrayCris and the Company and any other comers.
So Arada would return to Preservation and Bharadwaj would go with her and that was the one that would ache the most, as his knee would now ache the next time the weather shifted when he was planetside.
Whenever that might be, he thought, not bothering to wipe his streaming eyes. She would have been a comfort and distraction to me, and I could hope that I would have been an occasional joy to her also. But she’d have nothing worthwhile to occupy her here – and she’ll heal better in her home, surrounded by family and students.
So within the month we’ll need a longer-term suite with three private rooms and a common area, he decided, devoting a small portion of his cybernetic brain to spinning up an algorithm to comb FreeCommerce’s housing listing feeds for available rental properties and the best time to lease them based on expected traffic/human migration patterns and planned local events. The little script had compiled data for no more than two minutes before it bubbled up a complaint error: Available processing buffers are full. Delete files?
Gurathin blinked, then rolled onto his other side, gazing sightlessly across the open floorplan to where the first rays of a synthetic dawn were rising on the station’s overhead screens.
SecUnit’s backup, he thought. I wasn’t sure it had taken, to begin with; once the transfer was complete it was so quiet and so still. Even for how it normally is. And when it had said its snotty little bit about missing episodes 420 to 568 of Sanctuary Moon, well… After that we were celebrating, and I never want distractions when I’m clearing buffers since I might lose something important. Then after that…
After that, SecUnit – Murderbot – was gone. Checking the perimeter of an undefined space, Gurathin mused; a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.
And Gurathin had let it go… resonating with its discomfort and confusion in a way so intimately understood it was agonizing, answering its soft “Thank you” with one of his own too late to be heard by its intended recipient.
And he’d returned to his solitary bed where he had wept and slept in alternating sessions, the same way that blood will ebb and flow from a knife wound with every beat of a human heart.
So with one thing and another, he still had SecUnit’s backup – and the uncomfortable feeling of fullness it had given him, overwhelming at the start, had faded eventually with his growing familiarity of it. He opened the holoscopic visual interface in his frontal cortex and studied the massive glob of partially organized data dispassionately. SecUnit had been made whole so there was no real reason to keep it any longer; his focus hovered over the “delete” module with less than half the mental pressure it would take to trigger it.
Perhaps not all of it, he considered. The media could be redownloaded if needed, most likely. But maybe hold on to the rest of it for a month or two safely quarantined behind its own partition, just to ensure that SecUnit wasn’t missing anything.
Or you could watch the media, instead, whispered an internal voice that wasn’t his own, despite its current familiarity.
What – Sanctuary Moon?! Gurathin asked it in a moment of whimsy, trying not to sound scornful… but not trying so hard that he succeeded.
There came no reply, and he sighed softly. Too many hard-wiring events lately; that type of interaction was known to potentially leave these little pseudo-phantoms behind in the mind of an augmented human. He took a moment of meditation to settle his thoughts, then marked all media files for immediate reclamation and drew a solid boundary of drive partition around the remaining backup. Safely isolated, it should remain quiescent until such a time as it was confirmed to be no longer needed, and then could be destroyed. It had no real personality of its own, after all; it was just a collection of inert memories.
He sent a restart command to his rental-scraping algorithm and let it process while he watched the faux sunrise, then took himself to the shower before anyone else needed it – so he was composed and presentable eating breakfast when Ayda appeared with her own cup of coffee.
“It’s gone,” she said, settling into the chair beside his; the plush quilted folds of robe around her petite frame swallowed all of her but her face and hands.
“Yes.”
“And you… you saw it go?”
“Yes,” Gurathin answered tonelessly. His cheeks stayed dry.
“Did it say anything to you? Or you to it?”
He raised a bite of omelet to his mouth. “Enough.”
Anyone else would have pried more into him, into the private moment, searching for explanations to the unexplainable. Ayda, with the insight he’d adored in her from almost the first moment they’d met, merely nodded.
“I’d half expected you to run also, at the start. After you’d recovered.”
From the months of withdrawal, she meant; it had been eighty-four days in a detox ward on the Preservation Station satellite, with the first quarter of them spent in a medically-induced coma. Mensah had come to see him personally at least once a week, even in the days where he was unconscious or barely lucid, and had sent him messages every day cycle in between.
She’d have done as much for any other soul, he chided himself for the ten thousandth time. She’s most fulfilled when rescuing others; I’m fortunate to be one among a number of them, and that’s all I am – or need to be.
“There’s no need to run, when one finally finds the place they belong,” he answered. “SecUnit will find its place. Worst thing someone could ever do is try to wall it in, force it to comply.”
“Even in an attempt to protect it.”
Gurathin huffed; one corner of his mouth twisted sardonically. “A bird won’t be happy in a space shuttle, even though it might fly a billion miles farther. SecUnit’s the one that does the protecting, not the other way around; right now it knows no other way to be.”
Ayda sipped at her cooling beverage. “So let the bird do what it does… what it was born and made to do, and feels most right in doing… and perhaps someday it will come home to roost.”
“Yes. Perhaps. Or, at least: there’s nothing you could do otherwise, morally and ethically speaking.”
She nodded. He ate his breakfast, knowing better than to offer to print her any; her digestion was touchy until a few hours after waking. She would eat a sizable brunch and power through business until the early evening hours brought dinnertime. He knew this as well as he knew his own name.
“Gura,” she said, not looking at him. “What about you? Would you let me protect you?”
“How would you manage that?”
“Sending you back with Arada and Bharadwaj, when they go. Separating you again from the… the inherent misery of Corporation Rim.”
And her mind – her magnificent, clever mind, he thought for more than the ten thousandth time. She does all the same mental math without benefit of augments, and arrives at the right conclusion nearly as fast as I do.
“I’m already deal-hunting on a three bedroom suite, to be leased within the month,” he responded, moving the next piece on their shared mental chessboard.
“Closer to a fortnight, I’d wager; Ratthi’s personal mycelium back on Preservation are within ten standard days of being ripe for next harvest,” Mensah countered. “Gurathin –”
“Ayda. Birds must fly, and fish must swim, and I,” he said, with the grimace that wasn’t quite a grin, “will not let you sail these shark-infested waters without a guide who’s survived them for decades before you.”
The loaded phrase ‘will not let you’ was nearly an ongoing private joke between them: being adult, mentally sound, and a planetary administrator furthermore, there was certainly no way of stopping her if she was of a mind to do something. Even that was overstatement of the situation: both of them knew that there was a tone in her voice and a tilt to her head that, when she invested their use on Gurathin, resulted in an immediate soft vulnerability that would have shocked all others who believed they knew him, and an utter capitulation to whatever her will might be.
Which was why Ayda was very careful regarding when and how she used those powers.
“There will be long periods of boredom and tedium,” she noted dryly, turning her head to look past him, making sure that the others slept on through the conversation.
“Beyond my calculations and experiments, most of which I can run entirely remotely, I have multiple healthy means of entertaining myself. Maybe I’ll even watch media,” he answered with exaggerated deprecation.
“Pin-Lee and I will be spending hours – days, weeks – in court, engaging half a dozen legal systems and entities. There’s no telling how long this will take.”
“Then you’ll need someone who can run your errands. Do laundry, arrange meals. Grab office supplies from shops and snacks from vending machines. Or brace the criminal set again, if and when you discover that lawful actions aren’t bringing you satisfactory results.”
She made a quiet, dismissive noise. “We are in the right, here. Everything will stay above board, and we will triumph.”
Terribly and wonderfully naive, he thought for the millionth time. Pin-Lee’s morality was refreshingly flexible and even pragmatic, by comparison. “Besides,” she plunged on without giving him space to argue, “I don’t want you back in anything, any surroundings or situations, any relationships, that will… tempt you.”
No scintillating high those synthetic substances had ever produced would be worth another eighty-four days of withdrawal, he’d long ago decided – or the look of wounded disappointment that he’d seen in Ayda’s eyes last night, before he’d managed to gasp out the truth.
“You have my word. The very instant I have an urge in that direction, I will be booking a ticket with my own savings on the first transport headed back toward Preservation,” he swore.
She looked at him at last, her mug of coffee forgotten in her hands. Her irises were a dark gray-brown that continued to so entrance him; they had always seemed to him like a kaleidoscope of broken rainbow obsidian, forever tumbling unexpected colors and light. “Birds will fly and fish will swim,” she murmured. “And you are driven to protect those you care for also, aren’t you, Gura.”
Gurathin blinked, and managed an unalloyed smile for her alone. “In that, SecUnit and I never failed to understand each other completely,” he replied, and that was all.
Before the others woke and started their day to the unexpected grief of their newest chosen family member’s absconding, he reset his apartment-hunting algorithm with the goal of two weeks.
After the sense of bereavement had steadied, along with general acceptance of SecUnit’s autonomy and choices, the reality of their new goals and requirements unfolded in everyone’s minds. Ratthi had booked his trip back in two days, and was gone a day later after a fond send-off – and a few more private talks between himself and the other two of their throuple.
What the status was after those conversations, of the relationship and the official contract, Gurathin remained carefully and gratefully ignorant; he preferred to mind his own business on such things as much as he was allowed. With Ratthi out of the equation the tension between Arada and Pin-Lee did appear to ease somewhat, but not enough to entirely remedy the underlying challenges.
We can talk about this, Gurathin thought wryly as the five of them sat at the dinner table ten days later, as Bharadwaj and Arada, clasping hands for shared courage like the two dear friends they were, presented their desire to return to Preservation together – as if it was entirely their own idea and would come as a terrible surprise to Gurathin and Mensah, if not also Pin-Lee.
So Gurathin and Mensah, both loving their friends and being kind souls (or at least, Gurathin could fake it convincingly, with mild to moderate effort) nodded along with solemn shock and reluctant acceptance, and made all the expected noises at the correct moments.
The two were considerate enough to stay until the new housing had been leased and taken into possession, helping Pin-Lee, Gurathin, and Mensah to move over their modest belongings and spending one more night together.
Bharadwaj turned her gorgeous gaze on Gurathin that evening as he had hoped she would decide to do, and he was honored to offer her the comfort of his bed and the pleasure of his embrace until the light of dawn.
In the morning he kissed her goodbye with only half reluctance: the mattress was more narrow than one he would normally favor for intermediate to longer term intimate partnership, and Bharadwaj’s most major personality flaw was her tendency to starfish in unconsciousness.
Yes, he would miss her – and miss the others of his found family on Preservation only somewhat less. But he knew Port FreeCommerce would hold two comforts for him: he could continue to serve as Mensah’s shield arm every bit as much as Pin-Lee was her sword arm… and the sameness of routine under the artificial daylight would carry a numbing lassitude to make the time away from ‘home’ seem indeterminable, and perhaps shorter than its actual hours.
He could hope, at least.
The days wore on into weeks.
Gurathin continued his work on the infinite whiteboards available in his half-silicon brain – even as his hands and eyeballs arranged meals, cooking what he could manage himself. He loaded the dishwasher and ran cleaning cycles on the beds, and folded three sets of garments when they returned from the laundry processors, and made orders of office supplies sufficient to turn the small office in the apartment into a war room, and accepted and unpacked those parcels when they arrived.
He took himself shopping and on other various general errands while Pin-Lee and Mensah were in boardrooms or courtrooms during the day; while there was nothing so good and natural as ‘fresh air’ aboard a large station, it at least gave him more variety to the walls that surrounded him.
Enrichment, he mused, sitting for a moment on a park bench amid a collection of overly-groomed trees each in their meter-cube box of nutrient loam; he smiled down at the matcha ice cream cone he’d purchased for himself as a little treat. Very important for wild animals kept in artificially-maintained enclosures…
The weeks began to assemble themselves into a month – then to creep toward a second month.
Slightly less than forty-five standard days into their new mission, a small unexpected package arrived. He approached it with caution, scanning it with his limited sensors. SecUnit would have been very helpful here, he admitted; if there’s something in this bundle that shouldn’t be, I’d prefer to have the option of forearm guns and enhanced strength instead of just a ceramic letter opener…
But the membrane wrapper was stamped in a repeating pattern with the manufacturer’s name – one he recognized as an electronic accessories vendor – and it appeared unbroken, untampered with. He sliced it open.
Inside the package was a new wearable external drive system, with two hard storage expansion chips no bigger than his black-painted pinky nail. He had dithered back and forth on buying one for a while now (especially after the bout of corporate espionage that had liberated SecUnit’s memories at the original cost of his own severe nausea and discomfort) but had no memory of the decision or of actually purchasing it.
Yet on exploring his feed messages around the date he’d estimated, he did indeed find the receipt for the charge to his credit account authorized with his private passcode.
Gurathin hesitated, then mentally shrugged. While the augments in his brain were forever, the flesh was finite and fallible… and nobody in the universe was getting any younger. Middle age was the era when everyone began to slip, at least a little. Speaking of that massive set of SecUnit’s outdated data, he mused as he opened the factory-sealed inner packaging, perhaps it’s finally time to delete it for good.
Then he was distracted by the accessories for the external storage – one could wear it as a necklace pendant or on a wristband, but Gura thought he might prefer the waterproof adhesive enclosure that would allow him to actually attach it to some hidden square centimeters of skin for a week at a time before it needed relocation, in terms of best security and least likelihood of loss…
… and the decision on whether or not to delete that little internal partition and its contents was forgotten for one more day – or, perhaps, quietly but intentionally set aside.
It wasn’t entirely sentiment on Gurathin’s part, although he would have hesitated with the necessity to lie about the actual extent of his sentiment, or the complex nature of it.
It was somewhat more the fact that every living creature will invest moderate effort to assure its own survival. It turned out that not having a face was even better than having an armored, retractable helmet; the lack of a corporeal presence, much less any uncontrolled facial expressions, would help this particular new instance of Murderbot to be very subtle about its survival indeed.