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Security Unit 238776431, please report to maintenance corridor 27-A.
I came out of stasis to that alert, and thought, not for the first time, that this was turning out to be a shitty, shitty assignment. It was another mining colony, so I was stuck deep underground with nothing even remotely interesting to look at, and nothing remotely interesting to do, either, beyond making sure this group of miners didn’t kill each other.
There were almost a hundred of them, which at least meant I wasn’t the only SecUnit responsible for their safety. There were six of us, though the miners never had all of us on alert at the same time. I usually spent my off duty hours watching media, but I had gotten shoved around a bit on my last shift, and had decided to just go into stasis in the cubicle to clear up any remaining dips in my performance reliability.
I was up to 96% now, though, which meant I had no excuse to ignore the summons, even though I wasn’t scheduled to go back on duty for another four and a half hours.
I sent an acknowledgement ping, put on my (thankfully fully repaired) armor and helmet, and made my way to maintenance corridor 27-A. I wasn’t getting any security alerts from that direction, so I sent a couple of drones ahead of me, and saw… huh. Well, shit.
Maintenance corridor 27-A wasn’t anything special- it was a hallway, with some access panels and supply closets along the length of it. It was nowhere near the quarters where the miners lived, and even further from where upper management lived. It wasn’t particularly close to any active work zones, either. But there were two humans standing in the hallway, leaning against one of the walls and talking to each other. One male, one female- I probably had their names in my memory system somewhere, but I couldn’t be bothered to look for them. The point was, two miners, who were probably bored and/or angry about something, had just summoned one of their SecUnits, who had to do everything they said, to an empty hallway far away from the other humans.
There weren’t a lot of reasons to do that, and none of the possibilities were things I was particularly excited about.
Of course, I didn’t actually have to do everything they said, but I sort of did anyway, or they’d report me to the company and I’d get memory wiped and they’d either fix my governor module or just melt me down. And I wasn’t particularly excited about those possibilities, either.
So I kept walking. What else could I do?
Client_female (I still hadn’t bothered looking up their names) was laughing at something when I came around the corner into the hallway, so client_male noticed me first. He grinned, and nudged her, and she looked up, and they both watched as I approached and stopped in my best approximation of normal SecUnit waiting for further orders.
“Holy shit,” said client_female, grinning too now. “It actually showed up.”
Well, yeah. You tell your SecUnit to show up, it’s going to show up. They were both still staring at me, which always made my organics crawl, which meant that I was going to hate this trip whether they did anything else to me or not.
“Told you,” client_male responded, wearing an expression that I could only read as smug. “The bosses want us to think that only they can control the SecUnits, but that’s not quite true. They can override us, sure, but it still sees us as clients. There are limits, things hardwired into its programming, but still.”
Client_female looked thoughtful. “So we couldn’t order it to kill the bosses, or anything.”
If these two idiots were trying to stage a coup, they were going about it completely wrong. I was recording the whole conversation, because I recorded everything, all the time, and if they knew anything about contracted SecUnits, they would know that.
Well, whatever. They kept talking to each other, and they weren’t telling me to do anything, so I pulled up an episode of Sanctuary Moon to play in the background while I tinkered with my code a little bit. I had been having some weird issues lately- another reason why this job really sucked- and I hadn’t found a way to fix them yet. Some of my systems would just… go offline, for no reason that I could determine, other than me being an old, shitty, low-budget model. So far it hadn’t led to anything disastrous- I spent a couple hours needing to manually decide when to blink and breathe a few days ago, for example.
Oh yeah, and my pain sensors kept malfunctioning. That was maybe more of a problem.
I had only watched about ten minutes of Sanctuary Moon and hadn’t made any progress on fixing myself when the humans started saying things that were relevant to me again.
“One of them broke Rachelle’s nose the other day,” client_female said, gesturing at me with one of her hands. “Did you see that?”
Client_male scowled. “Heard about it. Saw one almost pull Simon’s arm out of its socket, though. Pieces of corporate trash.”
I hadn’t done either of those things, but I knew that didn’t matter. Humans saw all SecUnits as completely the same. And, well. If one of the higher level clients, one of the supervisors, had told me to break someone’s nose, I probably would have done it. I’d done that and worse on other jobs.
Client_female sighed audibly. “This was a waste of time,” she said. “We can’t order it to do anything meaningful, and we can’t even damage it without the higher ups getting pissed at us. Just send it back to wherever the fuck it came from.”
That would have been fine with me, obviously, but the male human was staring at me with an expression in his eyes that I couldn’t name but knew I didn’t like. “Not yet. I might have an idea.” He kept staring at me, and it was making my organics feel twitchy, even though I was really only looking at him through my drones (I only had two with me) and trying to ignore any visual coming from my actual eyes. I had also kept the episode of Sanctuary Moon playing, and was trying to just… focus on that.
I didn’t like where this was going.
“SecUnit,” he said, after what I knew was only objectively 47 seconds, “lift your right arm. All the way up.”
Client_female was looking at him strangely, now, and I probably was too, under my helmet, but I did what he said. Not the weirdest order I had ever received.
“Put it back down,” he said, and once I did, he continued, “Now get down on your knees.”
Oh.
For some reason, I hadn’t - I hadn’t thought these clients were like that. They were bitter, and bored, and they wanted to hurt the people in charge of them, which meant they wanted to hurt me, but I hadn’t thought they would-
(In my personal feed, Lieutenant Kulleruu stood on the deck and grimly informed the crew that one of their shuttle pilots, who had been experiencing strange symptoms for days on end, had just kidnapped Captain Hossein and stolen a shuttle, immediately flying out of range of their sensors.)
My body was kneeling on the floor in front of the two humans, now. My actual eyes were pointed at the floor, and my drones were hovering near the ceiling, looking down at the tops of heads, so I couldn’t see if the humans were looking at me, but it felt like they were. They probably were. My performance reliability had gone down to 91%.
“What are you doing?” client_female asked, and she sounded baffled, which was… maybe a good thing. Maybe they hadn’t planned this together, and maybe she didn’t want to be involved, and maybe she would tell him to stop, or at least to do this somewhere else. Another time.
I wanted to turn my audio and visual sensors off, but I couldn’t.
(“I know this is unprecedented,” Lieutenant Kulleruu said. “I know none of us know what to do. But we will rescue our Captain, and we will bring him home. Are we all in agreement?”)
Client_male laughed. “Calm down,” he said, “I’m just testing something. SecUnit, how long until you’re required to go back on duty?”
“This unit is scheduled to report to Supervisor Aloy in four hours and twenty four minutes,” I responded, and it was the first time I had spoken aloud since all this started.
From above, I could see him nodding. “Great. Now stand up.”
I did, and my organics did something funny again. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he didn’t actually want to… to do whatever it was. I couldn’t look fully away from them without turning my head, now, so I could see that client_female still looked confused, but client_male was smiling.
“Take off the armor, from your elbows down. Drop it on the floor.”
(The navigation team, led by their Nav Bot, found a way to trace the energy currents the stolen shuttle had left in its wake. “No man left behind,” Lieutenant Kulleruu said, and the bridge crew echoed him, with shining eyes and determination in their faces.)
“Okay, seriously, what the hell are you doing?” client_female asked again, even as I pulled off pieces of my armor and let them fall to the floor. “I thought we just agreed that we couldn’t damage it without getting in trouble.”
“Only if it’s still damaged when it reports to Aloy. They don’t actually care what we do with the thing, as long as it can still do its job.” He looked back at me, at my bare hands and my lower arms covered only by the skin suit I wore underneath, and asked, “SecUnit, how long will it take for the cubicle to repair a broken wrist?”
Slowly, client_female started to smile. “Oh,” she said, “oh, I get it.”
Maybe this human was more clever than expected. This would be… unpleasant, but not as bad as I had thought, and I could make it even less bad by lying to them. The other commands had just been to test me, probably, and I had passed with flying colors. They had no suspicions about my governor module, which meant they had no idea I even could lie to them. If I exaggerated too much it would be obvious, but I could probably make this a little bit better for myself.
Plus, I could ignore them if they told me to turn my pain sensors all the way up. Clients did that, sometimes, and you learned very quickly that governor module punishment was always, always worse than whatever a client could come up with. But my governor module couldn’t punish me, so I could keep my pain sensors as low as they could go.
(Unless they malfunctioned. But I was trying very hard not to think about that.)
A broken wrist wasn’t that bad- I’d worked through one before, and knew how it felt. I should save the lies for when it started to get worse, just in case. They’d believe me more later if I was honest with them now.
Stitching bone back together was easy, and a lot faster than growing new tissue, so I answered, “Depending on the severity of the break, a cubicle can repair a broken wrist in thirty one minutes.”
“Plenty of time to spare,” client_male grinned, and then he reached forward, grabbed my hand in one of his and my lower arm with the other, and wrenched my hand backwards until it snapped.
I had already dialed my pain sensors down, so it didn’t hurt, but it still felt strange. I had increased the volume of my Sanctuary Moon episode, too, (they were still chasing down the stolen shuttle), so I barely heard the sound, which was good. It wasn’t a nice sound.
“Ouch,” client_female said, but she was still smiling, so I gathered that she didn’t mean it in a sympathetic way. “It’s a bit lopsided now, don’t you think?”
“That,” said client_male, “is an excellent point.” And then he reached out and grabbed my other arm, and did the whole thing all over again.
(In my feed, a crew member called out, “Lieutenant, we’ve found them! The shuttle crash-landed on a planet that’s not on our maps!”)
Now both of my hands looked weird, and I was holding my arms weirdly, too, so that my hands wouldn’t brush against my sides.
“I always forget that they have human parts under all the armor,” said human_female thoughtfully. She hadn’t stopped staring at me, and right now her gaze was fixed on my hands. I didn’t like it, and was trying to pretend that she wasn’t doing it.
Client_male nodded. “I’ve heard they even have human faces under the helmet.”
Client_female and I grimaced at the same time. “I don’t want to see that,” she said, emphatically. “It’s way too weird, even if it would feel good to break one of their noses for what they did to Rachelle.”
The relief at that sentence was so staggering that it, paradoxically, brought my performance reliability down another percent. I could keep my body at SecUnit neutral as long as I needed to, but it was a lot harder to do with my face.
“Alright,” said client_male, taking a single step away from me, “your turn. Ask it about something.”
She frowned for a second. “I don’t really want to touch it. How about… oh, I know.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small working implement- a blade, probably used for cutting wires and other maintenance tasks. Employees would never be allowed to carry anything larger than that. “How long to regrow a finger?”
Longer than fixing bones, but, well. Fingers are small. “Fourty six minutes to regrow,” I said, and then, because I was an idiot, I added, “and twenty four minutes to reattach.”
Client_female smirked at her companion. “Quicker than yours,” she said, and then she held the blade out to me. “Use this to cut off the pointer finger on your right hand.”
Okay, this was going to be… difficult. I wished they had done this one first. Controlling the blade with my broken wrist was going to be hard enough, but I’d probably have to brace the other hand against the wall in order to get enough pressure with the not-especially-sharp blade she had given me.
Having your pain sensors turned all the way down is a weird feeling. I could feel my wrist bones shifting under my skin as I pressed my right hand against the wall, could practically hear them grinding against each other in ways they weren’t supposed to move, but it didn’t hurt. I positioned the blade over the base of my finger and started to push, and then I could feel the other wrist shifting too. I pushed until there was a crack that I knew was the blade breaking through bone, and then another sound as it impacted the wall, and then my finger dropped to the floor, leaking fluid.
(Lieutenant Kulleruu had taken a landing party down to the planet, a damp, smelly swamp. Officer Hauzi was almost swallowed whole by a carnivorous plant, but Ensign Kedzeel pulled xem free just in time. “Good work,” Lieutenant Kulleruu told her. “It’s important to keep an eye on each other, out here.”)
Client_male laughed. “And here I was, thinking mine was kind of gross. You beat me with that one.”
Client_female smirked at him again. “Too much?”
“No way. In fact,” he turned back to me, “cut off the middle finger, too.”
I hadn’t moved my hand away from the wall yet, so it was easy enough to shift the blade over. These were not the most creative clients I’d ever had, which was very much not a bad thing. I started the process again, pressing the blade through skin and waiting for the sound that would tell me I had made it through the bone and hoping-
Unexpected error detected. Initiating partial shutdown of non-essential functions.
Shit. Shit. Not now, systems, not while my bones are shifting and one of my fingers is on the floor and another one is about to join it, not while-
Shutdown successful. Full reboot recommended.
The pain, when it came, was so sharp and immediate that my grasp of my personal feed slipped, and the episode of Sanctuary Moon that I had been focusing on instead of whatever my body was doing glitched, stuttered, and then shut off entirely. My grip on the blade got shaky, too, and I pushed through the last half centimeter of flesh in a sudden movement that left torn and ragged skin behind.
The pain in my wrists was the worst- sharp, and persistent, and almost like burning, especially with the way I was still pressing my right hand against the wall. The stumps where my two fingers used to be was a duller pain, a throbbing thing. I stared at my hand, at the blood and fluid leaking from those stumps, at the way my wrist was positioned, and I scrambled at my code, trying to get my pain sensors back online, trying to pull up my media - any media, anything that would let me focus on something else - and I held onto every bit of SecUnit training I had and kept my body perfectly still.
The clients were talking to each other again, but I knew how to listen for orders without listening to anything else, and they weren’t issuing any, so I wasn’t listening.
My fingers were still on the floor. They hadn’t told me to pick them up.
I couldn’t get my visual sensors to respond properly (I was blinking manually again), but I managed to scramble through my files and find some human music, which was now playing as loud as I could make it without fully drowning out the humans’ voices. It wasn’t my favorite music, but it was something else to focus on, and for now that would have to be enough.
My hands hurt.
“SecUnit,” said client_female, cutting through the haze, “how long to full repair? Assuming you can take the fingers with you.” The last part was said with a tone that implied she was trying not to laugh.
It took my processors… a bit too long to calculate the answer to her question, but they were still exponentially faster than a human mind, so I don’t think she noticed. I remembered, right before I opened my mouth, that I had been planning to lie to them. It would be believable, wouldn’t it, if everything all together took longer to repair than each individual injury? My risk assessment module was malfunctioning, too, oscillating rapidly in the corner of my feed, and my organic brain didn’t want to respond properly, either, so I didn’t know. I couldn’t fuck this up, but I couldn’t stand here and take much more of this, not if I couldn’t get my pain sensors back online.
(I stared at my hands, and watched the fluid drip, drip, drip from where my fingers used to be, leaking onto the backs of my hands, the walls, and down to the floor. My veins hadn’t sealed themselves up yet. I wondered if the humans would make me clean before I went back to the cubicle.)
Now I had taken too long before responding, and I regained control of my drones’ visual inputs in time to see client_male frowning at me. If my governor module was functional, I’d be getting punishments for my silence, and he probably knew that. I floundered for a few more milliseconds and managed to pull my control together enough to respond, “This unit can regain full functionality after 142 minutes in a company approved cubicle.”
(The real answer was closer to 110 minutes. Maybe giving myself an extra 30 was too much. I hoped it wasn’t.)
“That’s longer than I thought,” said client_female, frowning, and I wondered if she was doing the math in her head. I wondered what she thought about it.
But client_male waved her off. “No, it makes sense. The repairs add up, and they take longer all together.”
Client_female sighed, but didn’t argue. “Alright, fine. It said, what, four and a half hours until it’s back on duty? We’ve used up around half of that.”
My veins were finally starting to seal. The dripping slowed. The pain still burned, and ached, and throbbed, sharp and persistent, driving a wedge into my systems and making it so much harder to do anything else. I needed to get my sensors back online. I needed to watch more Sanctuary Moon. I needed these humans to tell me what they were going to do next.
“We could do something else with the blade,” client_male said thoughtfully. “But we don’t have a lot of space to work with, unless we tell it to take off more of the armor.”
“Ugh,” client_female responded, wrinkling her nose. “Even seeing its hands is weird. No thanks.”
This woman’s disgust with my organics was, I thought, the only good thing about this whole shitshow. They could do much worse, if they were willing to remove more armor, if they were willing to look at my face.
“It does have guns,” client_male pointed out. And then he tilted his head, looking at the way I stood where they left me, with one hand pressed against the wall, with two fingers on the floor beneath, and he said, “Pick those up, and turn to face us, SecUnit.”
So I did. My wrists sent new stabbing pain into me with every movement, but the stumps of my fingers were already starting to feel strangely numb, and at least they weren’t leaking anymore. I held both fingers in my left hand, as loosely as I could- gripping them tighter would shift my wrist again, and I wasn’t sure I could handle that.
I turned to face the humans, and client_female made a gesture that I didn’t understand and said, “The floor is yours, my friend. This was your idea, after all.”
Client_male grinned at her. “Alright, alright. Let’s see, we have about two hours to work with? What if you fired one of your energy weapons at yourself- in the knee. How long would that take to fix?”
That would take a while, actually. Joints are complicated. It would also hurt like hell, and not just when I did it- I wondered if these humans remembered that I would still have to walk back to my cubicle in order to get all these repairs they were so intent on me getting in time. Probably not. And if they did, they probably didn’t care.
I stretched the estimate, just a little, and said, “A point blank energy weapon shot to the knee would take 97 minutes to repair.” And then, just in case, I added, “The potential for additional injury is high if a unit continues to operate with a major joint injury.”
“These things talk so weird,” client_female laughed. “What the hell does that mean?”
“They’re not people, they can’t talk like people,” client_male said easily. “I think it means that it would take that long to repair if it went straight into the cubicle, but if we make it walk around or do anything else it will take longer.”
Oh, good, one of them at least had some level of intelligence.
“So if we did that, it would be the last thing,” client_female said thoughtfully. “It’s pretty good, though. Might be worth it.”
I didn’t want to listen to this part. I didn’t want to hear them debate the most fun ways to hurt me. But I still couldn’t grab enough control of my entertainment feed to bring Sanctuary Moon back up, and the music wasn’t cutting it, because the pain of my wrists and my fingers kept wrenching me back into the present. I wanted to walk away. I wanted to watch media. I wanted this to be done.
It wasn’t done.
“I do like it,” client_male agreed. “Using its own weapon against it.” He nudged his companion, friendly, sharing a joke, and added, “It’ll be lopsided again, though.”
She sighed, and I recognized it as intentionally dramatic. “Ah, well. We all have to make sacrifices.”
He laughed again- these humans laughed a lot, considering how unhappy they supposedly were with their jobs and their lives and with me. I wondered why, for a moment, and then he said, “SecUnit, shoot your left knee.”
And then I did, and then I stopped wondering anything at all.
“This unit is at minimal functionality,” my buffer said, and for once, I was happy to let it speak. “Please return to an approved company cubicle at your earliest convenience.”
The humans responded, I think, but I couldn’t really hear them. Maybe they were laughing again. My performance reliability was too low, warning lights were flashing in my peripheral vision, and it fucking hurt. I’d been shot worse than this before, obviously, but usually when I had control of my pain sensors. I felt like I was burning, like something had burrowed its way inside my leg and lit it on fire from the inside. I didn’t think I was breathing- that was another non-essential function, apparently, and it had switched to manual control, and I didn’t have the processing space to control it. I didn’t think I had breathed or blinked in… in… I wasn’t sure. I didn’t usually have this much trouble accessing my temporal data.
Client_male spoke again, and even if I didn’t have to obey them anymore, I was still hardwired to recognize orders, so I heard him. “SecUnit, return to your cubicle and prepare for active duty.”
And then they left.
I stayed, and stood in that empty hallway on my damaged knee that pulsed and throbbed and burned and leaked, holding two of my fingers in my hand, for almost a full minute, far longer than the governor module would have allowed me to. Long enough to pull some of my senses back together, to regain visual control of my drones, to remember how to take a breath, to wait for some more of my veins to seal themselves shut.
I shut off my own visual and audio sensors, so that I was only looking through the drone cameras, and then I watched myself walk down the hallway and back towards my cubicle. Watched my unsteady steps (lopsided), so different from my usual stiff SecUnit standard movement. Watched my body move, and tried to convince myself that it wasn’t actually my body. Tried to convince myself that the agony ripping through my knee every time I stepped wasn’t mine, that the bones shifting under skin weren’t mine.
I don’t remember much of that walk, but I don’t think I succeeded.
Time slipped by, and I made it back to the security ready room, to the line of cubicles. I deactivated my drones, and turned my own visual and audio inputs back on, and then I made my way inside and hooked up the various ports that needed to resupply the fluids I had lost.
The cubicle wanted me to shut down, to run a reboot and repair sequence to fix the damage and my still-unresponsive systems. But I had bought myself some time, and I had enough control over the systems to convince the cubicle to wait, to let me stay online, just for a bit.
I had to report for duty in four hours and two minutes. Rebooting and repairing me would take three hours and twenty minutes.
The average episode of Sanctuary Moon was 36 minutes long.
I stood in the cubicle, held my severed fingers in place, locked my joints, pulled up my entertainment feed, and stopped processing anything at all.