Chapter Text
I’ve always found the quiet of my office on Preservation Station unnerving. The walls are well-insulated, the hum of station life carefully tuned to a level that most people find comforting. But I was raised on a farm, where silence meant something was wrong— an engine stalled, a weather drone disabled, a child sneaking toward the berry fields.
Out here, silence is just…silence. Except when it isn’t.
“I’m not lurking,” SecUnit said from the doorway.
I looked up. I hadn’t heard the door open. I hadn’t heard it move at all. That was more unnerving than the silence.
“No,” I said, keeping my voice light. “You're just standing very still, in a dark corner, behind a privacy field you bypassed, in direct violation of every station access protocol.”
It shrugged. It was in its soft, casual clothes in Perihelion’s colors. Still looked vaguely ominous in the dim lighting. Still had the stance of someone ready to sprint into a firefight. That, or sprint away from an awkward conversation.
“Protocol violation is technically my job,” it said. “I’m Security.”
I paused my work interface and leaned back in my chair. “Is that why you’re here?”
It hesitated. Long enough that I knew it wasn’t here to report anything urgent. It always led with mission data, injuries, or explosions. I braced myself. SecUnit didn't often “just visit.”
“No mission,” it said eventually. “I was…in the area. ART’s drone is still processing medscan data from the last firefight, so I had some cycles.”
I could have let it go. I should have. But when you’ve been abducted, nearly killed— again— and rescued by a rogue SecUnit with more PTSD than it lets on, your tolerance for avoidance-based friendship maintenance shrinks considerably.
So I smiled gently and said, “You’re checking on me.”
It flinched. Just a little. Just enough.
“You’ve been off your usual path for three days,” it said, clearly hoping deflection would pass for subtlety. “And you skipped your last two scheduled station updates.”
I folded my hands, elbows on the desk. “And you care.”
It didn't answer, which, for SecUnit, is practically a declaration of emotional vulnerability.
The room went quiet again. I didn’t press. I've learned not to chase it when it gets like this— tensely still, eyes just slightly too bright, like it’s reviewing every possible scenario in which this conversation ends with me yelling, rejecting, or demanding an explanation.
Instead, I said, “Amena keeps asking about you. She's still telling everyone the story of how you jumped through a hole in the side of a transport vessel because, and I quote, ‘the planet mom was on exploded a little bit.’”
SecUnit made a sound. Probably a groan.
“Children should not be allowed to hyperbolize planetary incidents,” it muttered.
“She thinks you’re the coolest thing in the system.”
It shifted again. “That’s because she hasn’t watched World Hoppers: Core Collapse. Episode twelve had very realistic orbital decompression physics. I was impressed.”
“You recommended that episode to her.”
“…Maybe.”
I smiled again. Softer this time. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being here.”
It looked at me directly then, just briefly, its expression unreadable but unmistakably attentive. “You don’t have to thank me for that.”
“I know,” I said, standing and walking around the desk. “But I want to.”
I reached out— slowly— and rested my hand lightly on its upper arm. It was warm under my fingers. A human temperature. It still flinched, but didn’t pull away.
“I’m not as okay as I pretend to be,” I admitted. “But I’m working on it.”
It nodded once, very slightly. “Same.”
I let my hand drop.
“We don’t have to talk,” I said. “Not right now. You can just stay.”
It stood still for another beat, then moved to the corner of the room, crouched down with its back to the wall, and flicked on its feed. I heard the faintest tinny sound of an old serial— probably one it had already watched seven times.
And we sat like that, in the silence between signals, together.
Amena sat on the back railing of the veranda, knees tucked up under her chin, long legs folded like a grasshopper’s. She’d always done that— since she was little. Like she wasn’t quite ready to commit to the ground or the sky, so she hovered somewhere in between.
I stepped out with two cups of ginger-and-lime tea. Her favorite. She took one without looking at me.
“So,” she said after a sip, “are we going to talk about how you almost died again, or are we just pretending that’s normal now?”
I took the chair beside her and stretched my legs out. The sun was low, brushing gold across the fields and the edge of the irrigation towers.
“We can talk,” I said, “if you want to.”
She gave me a look. “Don’t mom-voice me.”
“Wasn’t going to. You’ve earned a lot more than the mom voice.”
Amena was quiet for a moment. She tapped the rim of her mug with her fingernail. A rhythm that almost sounded like a feed sequence. Probably SecUnit’s influence.
“I don’t like this,” she said finally. “This thing where I have to worry about whether my parent is going to come back.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” Her voice sharpened. “You think you do, but you’re still acting like you’re invincible. Like trauma is something you can just spreadsheet away.”
That stung. Mostly because it was true.
I looked out at the fields. “You sound like Bharadwaj. Or SecUnit.”
Amena snorted. “SecUnit is worse. It doesn’t even pretend to know how to cope. It just watches 400 hours of media and threatens people with sarcasm and energy weapons.”
We both smiled. Briefly.
“You know,” I said, “when I asked it to watch over you, it didn’t like that. At all.”
“Yeah. I noticed. It looked at me like I was a fragile meat-based complication.”
“You were a fragile meat-based complication. We all are to it.”
She exhaled, sharp and frustrated. “I don’t want to be protected. Not like that. Not by you, not by it. I want to be part of this. Whatever it is. What we do.”
“You already are.”
“Then stop keeping everything from me like I’m some intern who’s just tagging along for her education credit.”
I looked at her then— really looked. And I saw it: the fear she hadn’t said, the stubborn courage she didn’t need to, and the hurt. Still raw around the edges. Not from me, or SecUnit, not directly. But from what we all had to do to survive.
“You’re not tagging along,” I said softly. “You’re one of us. And yes, you’re young. But that doesn’t make you expendable, and it doesn’t make you incapable. I trust you.”
She looked down into her mug.
“And I’m sorry if we made you feel like you had to earn that,” I added.
Amena’s shoulders dropped just a little. “SecUnit didn’t tell you about Maris, did it?”
Ah. There it was.
“No,” I said. “It didn’t.”
She nodded. Then, almost to herself: “I knew it. It could have. It knew. But it didn’t.”
“It sometimes understands boundaries better than it lets on..”
She laughed, the sound brittle and sudden. “Yeah. Until it doesn’t.”
I smiled. “That’s why I trust it. And why I trust you.”
There was a long silence, but this one didn’t feel strained. Just full.
Then Amena said, “I thought I was just ordinary. That I didn’t have anything special. Not like you or first mom. Not like Gurathin, or Pin-Lee, or even Ratthi. But SecUnit listened to me. It fought with me. For me.”
“You’re not ordinary,” I said, setting my mug down. “You’re you. And anyone who’s met you knows how terrifying that is.”
That got a real smile. She bumped my shoulder with hers, just like she did when she was ten and sulking after a test.
“And for the record,” I added, “SecUnit may be capable of annihilating a hostile combat unit with one arm tied behind its back, but I have seen it back away from your anger like it's the more dangerous opponent.”
“Good,” she said, smiling wolfishly. “I plan to stay terrifying.”
We sat there a while longer, sipping tea, watching the last sunlight streak over the valley.
Later that night, I noticed a new data marker on our house network. A silent ping. No feed. Just a tag: Unit present. No threat detected.
SecUnit wasn’t trying to intrude. It was just…watching. From a respectful distance.
Amena saw it too, and didn’t say anything.
She smiled.
The house had gone quiet hours ago.
The younger children were asleep, finally. The aunts and uncles had wandered off to bed in groups, talking softly in the way extended family did— half gossip, half caretaking. Even Farai and Tano had gone to our room, after gently suggesting I should rest too.
I hadn’t taken the suggestion.
Instead, I found myself in the kitchen alcove, nursing a third cup of tea gone cold. The table was cluttered with signs of life— books, datapads, a pair of Amena’s abandoned boots, still muddy from the path. A small plush shaped like an indigenous flying cephalopod rested beside my elbow, left behind by one of my nieces or nephews. I didn’t know which. It was all blessedly normal.
And yet I couldn’t sleep.
There was a certain kind of silence I’d come to know intimately— the silence after disaster. The part where everyone else starts to move on, and you’re still listening for the sound of footsteps that didn’t return. Or the alarm that didn’t go off. Or the voice you almost didn’t get back.
I stared at the door like I expected SecUnit to walk through it. It didn’t, of course. It wouldn’t.
It wasn’t like before. It was here now. On Preservation. Not quite a resident, but not not a resident. A signal that flickered around the edges of the surveillance net, visible only to those of us who’d earned the right to see it.
I’d watched the feed just last night— its marker moving through the hills near the northern boundary. Not surveilling. Not guarding. Just…moving. And I’d felt safer, somehow.
Not because I believed it would stop everything bad from happening. That was never the point.
But because I knew it would try. Because it cared, whether or not it could say it out loud.
I sipped my tea. Cold, bitter. I didn’t mind.
There had been a moment— back on the station— when I thought I wouldn’t come back. Not this time. When the gunship powered up, when the feed went blank, when we were separated. I had sat very still in the corner of that holding cell, every part of me running a triage of the inevitable.
And I’d thought of my children. Of Farai and Tano. Of my sister’s laugh. Of the wind through the terraces of my childhood farm.
And of it.
Of SecUnit.
Not because I thought it would rescue me— though it did, with its usual amount of reckless, barely-legal brilliance— but because I knew it would try.
That was the difference. Between what I once thought a SecUnit was and what I now knew it could be. Between machine and person. Between owned and free.
Between past and future.
I looked down at my hands— steady now. They hadn’t always been. I still woke in the night thinking I could hear that combat unit breathing behind me. Still had to pause when stepping through doors, waiting for the possibility of something on the other side. Open plains make me sweat.
This was the shape of my survival.
Holding together teams that wanted to splinter. Answering questions I couldn’t ask myself. Taking in people who didn’t know how to be taken in. Sitting through meetings when I wanted to scream. Keeping still in the dark.
Mine didn’t come with weapons or tactical overlays. It came with tea, and field reports, and long hours spent listening to voices shaking just slightly. It came with staying.
But that wasn’t the truth of it.
The truth was: I survived because I was not alone. Because people— humans, augmented humans, constructs, whatever SecUnit would like to call itself today— stood between me and harm.
And maybe, someday, I’d have to do the same for them.
I turned off the kitchen light.
The night outside was cloudless. Stars like scattered ice. Somewhere out there, just beyond sensor range, SecUnit was probably sitting on a ridge, watching a serialized drama with far too many explosions and not enough narrative arc.
And somewhere even further out, the rest of the universe was waiting to test us again.
But not tonight.
Tonight, I will go to bed.
And for the first time in a long time, I believed that I might sleep.