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Ratthi helps Mensah drag SecUnit to the security ready room, his shoulder is screaming under its weight but he keeps his mouth firmly shut. It shot itself for them, the least he can do for it is get it to its room.
He hasn’t been in here before. He thought it would be a bit like their rooms, a bit smaller and filled with surveillance screens with SecUnit’s things everywhere. Maybe a workbench for it to do maintenance with, spare armour hanging on a rack, a bed that doubles as a station for when it needed to recharge.
It’s not.
It’s a storage room filled with boxes and shelving units, a printer and recycler located in one corner and a big white box at the end. It smells vaguely chemical but is otherwise clean and sterile with no signs that someone lives there. It’s just a place to store their spare supplies, their equipment and their weapons.
His eyes drift towards SecUnit slack over his shoulder, the hole in its chest and armour hardly standing out against the other injuries it received at DeltFall. There’s a similar hole in its hip and Ratthi has to wonder how it even managed to walk with Mensah back to the hopper. How it had the strength to ignore its pain and shoot itself, to save them. (Like it had a choice, it had no choice but to sacrifice itself again. Hates that he's thankful it did.)
“We need to put it in the cubicle.” Mensah says from under its other arm. She guides him in dragging SecUnit to the end of the room, to the only item big enough to rest a SecUnit.
“We’re putting SecUnit in… there?” He asks in disbelief, needs to double check and hopes he has misunderstood.
“Yes.”
The cubicle is just a plain white box with a dark display screen on the outside. It has thick cables entering it from the wall of the habitat and has a heavy seal around the edge of its lid, hinting that it is air tight once closed. There’s a small collection of warning instructions he can’t read without bending over and dropping SecUnit.
It’s just a white box.
“That’s…” Ratthi stares at it uneasily. Optimistically, it’s bigger than the transport box SecUnit was delivered in, but only slightly. (That had been an unpleasant shock at the start of the survey and he had done his best not to think of it since.)
In the cubicle it would barely have space to roll onto its side, certainly it couldn’t stretch or curl or sit up. There was no way it could find anything resembling comfort. It would be cut off from the rest of the world and it couldn’t even change positions. His skin crawls. “That’s inhumane.”
Mensah makes an unhappy noise. “Yes, it is.” She presses a button and there is a faint sound when the cubicle releases its seal, a hiss of air as the top of it slides open and reveals its interior.
An automatic light toggles on with a cooling fan. The interior is hard and empty, featureless white plastic with a number of ports and cords retracted into the side. There are drainage holes in the bottom of it, but nothing else. Nothing for SecUnit to look at or interact with, no internal display devices, nothing but blank white walls.
It doesn’t even have a pillow.
“This is inhumane.” He repeats himself. His skin has moved on to prickling painfully, and he is keenly aware of SecUnit’s warm bulk on his aching shoulder. He's going to put a person into a box.
Ratthi has been part of this, with his ignorance. He knew theoretically that it was no more than a slave created by the company, with just enough biological material to be sentient. That it was considered to be nothing more than a tool to be brought out then packed away when no longer needed. It was still hard for him to wrap hid head around how thoroughly the company regarded it as a tool, how he had come to delusion that perhaps it was a situation similar to an indentured person. With no choice but to work for the company, but still receiving their basics needs in limited doses: scheduled time off, rest periods, some personal items, entertainment access, a change of clothes, a pillow. Something that indicated a superficial recognition that there was a person in there.
These past few cycles kept dashing that illusion, everything he learned about it breaking his heart more each time. That SecUnit had no choice but to put itself in harms way for them, that its sacrifices were not a willing choice that it made but coerced through its programming and enforcement, that it clearly had feelings and opinions it wasn’t allowed to express, that it was so unused to being treated like a person that it flinched away from any sort of attention.
How the company made it a bed that was nothing more than a plastic box without even a pillow.
Ratthi swallows as Mensah starts interacting with the cubicle’s display, focuses on the warmth that was SecUnit’s body slung across his shoulders. When it woke up, he was going to do everything possible to treat it like a person, anything to balance out what the company has tried to remove from it.
Together, the two of them lift SecUnit over the rim and lower it into the box. It’s incredibly awkward with its larger bulk and stiff limbs. The design of the cubicle prevents them from being as gentle as he wished they could be. Ratthi feels a jolt of alarm as he loses his grasp on SecUnit and drops it the last 10 centimetres, cringes at the dense thud it makes as it hits the hard plastic.
“Sorry!” It bursts out of him even as Mensah swears to herself.
SecUnit can’t hear them but he’s still profoundly sorry for dropping it like its some kind of thing. He tries to make up for it by fussing over moving its limbs into what he hopes is a more comfortable position. The cubicle doesn’t give many options, especially once Mensah pulls the supply and repair leads out of their spots in the cubicles wall and tilts (shoves, its own design is making them treat it so callously) SecUnit to reveal its multiple ports.
They are colour coded, because of course the company has colour coded this person. It’s very simple. The red resupply lead goes in the port with the red ring. The blue repair lead goes into the port with the blue ring. There’s a third lead, and he’s not sure what this one is for, but it is yellow and SecUnit has a port with a yellow ring further down its spine. The dataport is not colour coded, but it is the only one of that shape and its cable clicks into the back of SecUnit’s neck with the faintest of noise.
It’s all very simple and easy to apply to SecUnit, like following the installation instructions for a new permanent display device and all the cables that come with it.
Ratthi can’t decide if he hates plugging all these leads into SecUnit, because of the thought processes that had to go behind their design to colour code them and make them different shapes. Or if he is just thankful that he is plugging the right lead into the right port for SecUnit so that they can help it get better.
He looks away from the ports to its face to remind himself this is a person. Its eyes didn’t close all the way when it shutdown- when it killed itself, he corrects, because this is a person who was forced to save them by killing itself- and he can see them reflecting the harsh light of the cubicle between its eyelashes. He tries to close them fully, so the light doesn’t disturb SecUnit, but they seem fixed in that unsettling half-open position and he wonders if it will see this as a recording later. If there’s some organic part of it that is awake and seeing him (and later the lid of the terrible box they are locking it away in). Trapped in its body trapped in a cubicle trapped in its life as their slave.
His tentative touch of SecUnit’s eyelids revealed that it was cooling down under the fan. It’s not shivering, but he’s not even sure if SecUnit can shiver or if it is forced to tolerate that discomfort in immobility too. It is way too cold, why is it so cold? He can feel the low temperature of it cooling his skin from where he is leaning over it.
“The cubicle says it will take about 6 hours to fix its injuries. Then we can get to removing the override.” Mensah steps back from the cubicle’s display and his stomach drops. He doesn’t want to close the lid on it and forget about it for 6 hours.
“Hang on, I just- I need to. Just hang on, don’t close it yet.” The words stumble out as he flees from the room. Ratthi had brought lots of blankets with him, lots of pillows, lots of items of comfort. They were reminders of home with their colours and smells. It was easy to grab some for SecUnit. (He wishes he could grab more, but the cubicle is much too small to allow much more than one pillow and one small blanket.)
“Sorry, sorry.” He tells Mensah as he enters again, almost running back into the room from the irrational concern that she would lock SecUnit in that cold box while he was gone. (He knows she wouldn’t, he knows this.)
“I just, I can’t leave it like that. It’s not something we can just pack away.” He knows its meant to be something they can just pack away, but it’s not.
“Of course.” She smiles approvingly, “What a great idea Ratthi.”
He tucks the pillow under its head, mindful of the cable attached into the base of its neck. Then he hesitates with the blanket, he wants to lay it over the top of SecUnit but then how does the cubicle fix its wounds? Is he making things worse for it? He turns to Mensah but she’s already caught on.
“Go ahead.” Mensah says. “When I spoke to it, after it saved Bharadwaj, it had an emergency blanket in there with it. The cubicle was still able to perform its repairs. I think its okay for you to give it this.”
That does makes him feel better. Ratthi drapes the blanket over SecUnit and the cubicles cords, hides its injuries from their view and buffers it against the coldness radiating out from the box. Doesn’t tuck it in too tightly, as he wasn’t sure SecUnit would like that kind of sensation when it wakes up.
It looks like a person in a coffin.
“Ratthi, the cubicle can’t repair SecUnit with the lid open.” Mensah gently interrupts his thoughts.
“Right, right.” He makes himself slide the lid, watches as the light in the cubicle turns off and plunges SecUnit into darkness. He couldn’t see it anymore as it seals shut.
The cubicle starts to make a deep humming noise and Ratthi leans his hands against the top of it. “I think I’ll stay here, if that’s alright. Just, keep it some company.”
Mensah nods at him, apologises for leaving him with a comforting hand to the arm. Leaves him to stand alone in this cold, empty room that SecUnit has been returning to every cycle.
There isn’t even a chair.