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I was sort of there, floating between another catastrophic malfunction and going offline. My systems would flash on and off, each status change sending a jolt of pain through me. It wasn’t a fun time.
I was in the little hopper, my humans talking above me, but it was muffled and distorted as my audio inputs drifted around in my head and refused to get into line. Arada was holding my hand and it was a warm weight I could use to bring the rest of myself into focus.
I was in pain and I was cold. Diagnostic alerts were all over the place. I was very, very damaged and my functionality was too low to dial down my pain sensors. I tried to adjust my temperature controls instead.
“Input Celsius 25.” I think I said that out loud, as the voices around me suddenly went quiet. That unsettled me so I tried to focus on Arada’s face to check if they were all looking at me, but she had leaned back to say something to someone behind her.
My inorganics continued to leach the heat from my organics, and the hopper floor leached the heat from my inorganics. I wasn’t just cold and in pain, I was freezing. I tried to adjust my settings again as there wasn’t much else I could do.
“Input Celsius 25.” Nope, that was definitely the verbal interface and not my internal temperature controls. I tried to grab the right connections but everything was out of order.
It was frustrating to be so cold on top of the pain. My body had started to shiver, an uncontrollable tremor which made the rest of me twitch, which also hurt a lot. I wished I could float outside of my body like in DeltFall, I didn’t like experiencing this.
“It’s cold.” Someone with a voice filled with concern said it, but I lost time again before I could link the audio of their voice to an ID in my database.
UNIT OFFLINE
A shiver brought me back to awareness.
My performance reliability was so low I struggled to make sense of where I was. I should know this. I should know why my inputs were scattered around and out of my control.
Eventually I realised I was looking at the roof of the little hopper. I had been wrapped up in something – a survival blanket from the texture and the way it slightly warmed me. That made me feel something on the inside and I twitched my hand to pull it tighter around me.
Mensah leaned over me and I flinched in surprise (ow). Without my camera connections, I hadn’t realised she was there. Their absence was like a static filled hole in my head that I numbly poked at. No temperature controls, no cameras.
“Hello.” It was part buffer and part default behaviour module. I was too scattered to try and pick my words or ask her all the questions slowly filling my queue. I stared up at her. Why was I in the little hopper? Where was the pick-up transport to rescue my humans?
Mensah seemed to recognise the confusion in my expression and explained to me. “The beacon worked, you did it! We’re waiting for our rescue, it will be a few days but we are in a secure location until they contact us.” Right, the 5-cycle delay. I had forgotten about that, or, I knew it but it was buried behind all the diagnostics somewhere.
I shivered again.
“We only have one survival blanket in this hopper I’m afraid.” She looked down at me for a long time, her eyes flicked all over my face but avoided making eye contact. “We didn’t want to risk going back to the habitat.”
I managed to hold in another shiver and continued to stare upwards.
“That’s good.” It was good, I was glad my humans didn’t do something stupid like go back to a habitat filled with hostiles and getting shot, all because they wanted to put a blanket on their defective SecUnit.
I mostly felt confusion that they had wasted their only blanket on me, when the nights on this planet were so cold. They are soft sensitive humans, they probably just wanted to cover up my damage from their sight the way I covered up the exploded GrayCris body in the common area. Ratthi vomiting from looking at me wouldn’t be good for their energy conservation while waiting for rescue, so I guess it made sense if I thought of it that way.
I scanned the area as much as I could without moving my head (despite the twitching in my hands, I suspected my neck was broken from its non-response to movement instructions. I’ve had that happen before and it kind of felt the same. Like my body was far from me and slow to move, stray limb inputs scattered across my feed that required a lot of concentration to function. This wasn’t why my temperature settings were broken, that was due to the low performance reliability caused by all the other damages made from falling a large distance after being shot at multiple times. There was a lot of different types of damage, so I started dragging them into a neat report. I could do that.)
The other humans were huddled together on the seat-couch. Bharadwaj was curled into Gurathin’s side, her face buried in his lap, the faint sheen of tear tracks visible even in the dim light. Gurathin, his leg stuck out awkwardly and crammed up against the hopper wall, had his chin resting on her head, his own expression tight with pain. Pin-Lee, Arada and Ratthi were a tangle of organics, wrapped up in each other with their foreheads touching as they whispered soft words.
There was a spot where Mensah must have been, before she came over to where I laid shaking on the floor.
I could see her breath in the air so I knew they must be cold, probably colder than me since they had more organics to be cold with. That made me feel something. Mostly that I vaguely knew that it wasn’t right for the SecUnit to be under a survival blanket while the humans huddled together for warmth. (There was no point putting the survival blanket on me, it wouldn’t stop me from dying and was a waste of resources. I mean, I was probably going to die anyway from the extensive damages, or the repeated system crashes, or once the company discovered my broken governor module and acid bathed me.)
Something in me twisted.
I clenched the survival blanket harder and forced myself to shove it at Mensah. It was an uncoordinated movement that took a lot of effort, stronger than I needed, and it made the human pile split apart as everyone startled at the noise then flailed into each other. They stammered apologies and questions at each other. They were very clumsy, my humans.
The sudden movement, the spike of pain it gave me combined with the loss of the small amount of warmth I had gained, caused a sudden loss in performance reliability. I had a nanosecond to hope Mensah could read me as well as I thought she could before I crashed again.
UNIT OFFLINE
I was still inert on the floor and I was still staring at the little hopper roof. My systems were so sluggish it took a really long time to identify it as that.
I wanted to look around but my neck still refused to turn. (Because it was broken, my memory archives prompted me. Which, yeah. Ow. My body felt so heavy with its disrupted connection.)
My shivering had stopped and I wasn’t as cold anymore. I tried to twitch my hand to feel if I was in the survival blanket again but it was non responsive.
I hoped that my weird humans hadn’t wasted their resources and wrapped me in the survival blanket again. Especially after all that effort (and system crash) I went through to give it back to Mensah. They needed that to look after each other so that they could survive until rescue and the survival blanket would help with that (and make them more comfortable).
In the corner of my eye I could see something fuzzy. Slowly, I managed to refocus my visual inputs to realise that Mensah was lightly pressed against me, breathing rhythmically against my arm. The fuzzy was her hair. She was warm.
I think I would have frozen if I wasn’t already immobile. I tried anyway, inputs instinctively trying to freeze every joint. I was so startled my background systems forgot to breathe until I mentally kicked them into running again. (Systems such as breathing didn’t disable themselves when I was excessively damaged like temperature regulation and pain sensors did. Probably because discomfort wouldn’t kill a SecUnit but loss of oxygen to our neural organics would.)
I let my eyes drift to the other side of me to confirm that the warmth I was registering there was also a human, Ratthi sprawled out. His arms were all over the place, hovering above me at odd angles but not touching. I was glad he was sprawled like that, he would get covered in fluids and it would really hurt if he let his arm rest on me.
Laid on top of his legs (or between them or next to them, the angle made it kind of hard to tell), were Pin-Lee and Arada, wrapped up in each other and their combined body heat radiated against my thighs. That was four of my humans counted.
Reluctantly I tried to look down my right, beyond Mensah. I could feel the nearby warmth and eventually (well over a minute, my processing was very slow and it took a lot of effort) I was able to identify the blurry lump as an exhausted Bharadwaj. Her head rested on the survival blanket and no longer held a trace of tears. She was using it as a pillow which seemed even more wasteful than using it on a SecUnit.
I was so outraged at this inappropriate use, that it took even longer to identify that the pillow was actually Gurathin, curled up between Mensah and Bharadwaj, with the survival blanket wrapped tightly around him. He radiated the most heat, I didn’t need my disconnected health monitor to know he was running a temperature again.
I was having so many complex emotions, most of them focused around how warm they were keeping me without directly touching me or hurting me.
It was so confusing and so overwhelming that I didn’t fight the system crash as it took me under again.
UNIT OFFLINE