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I honestly didn’t think anything was wrong when I came back online. I mean, obviously I was kind of freaked out, but for Station Security in the Corporation Rim it was actually a pretty smart move on their part. No one wants a SecUnit active on a space station, let alone a rogue SecUnit, so they put me in stand-by until they could figure out what to do with me.
Well, okay. They didn’t put me in stand-by. Their construct-specific EMP did that for them.
So anyway, when I came back online I was kind of freaked out. Luckily for everyone involved Arada was right there in front of me, Thiago standing behind her and frowning at me (which is normal, Thiago’s always frowning at me). I ran a diagnostic, and everything came back normal; Arada said “SecUnit, are you okay?” and I said “Yes.”
Because I was. Or I thought I was, anyway.
I didn’t even get a warning. I was just minding my own business, watching Legends of Aquarius9 while lying on my bed, and suddenly a sickeningly familiar pain lanced down my spine, radiating out right from the center of my brain. It was so sharp I dropped all of my inputs, vision and hearing and sensory all dropping offline at the same time.
Alerts were streaming into my feed, most coming from my own systems but a few from Ship as well. The shock faded, and as I regained my inputs I scrambled to my feet, frantically checking the hack on my governor module; it was fine, so then what—
My vision whited out as another shock was administered, my joints locking up to prevent me from toppling over. Fuck this, fuck me, what did I even—
Okay. Think, Murderbot. What would the company want?
Well. They wouldn’t want a rogue murderbot, for one. But given I wasn’t a pile of melted organic mush yet, my governor module probably wasn’t aware that I was (supposed to be) rogue. The next biggest transgression I could think of was being active on a ship; okay, fine, I’d just put myself in stand-by.
I was out my door and running for the cargo module before the next shock was administered. I think there were humans in the corridor, because I nearly crashed into one, but I was so focused on pushing myself through the pain that I didn’t even make note who it was. I slammed into the door of the cargo module—usually you aren’t supposed to go in there while the ship is in transit, but there’s a door with an override code in case of emergencies—and sent a frantic request to Ship as another shock jolted through my brain.
Error: query unknown, Ship replied.
Fuck. I sent my request again, and this time it must have gotten through because the hatch slid out from under my shoulder, and I sprawled across the threshold into the cargo hold. I hit the floor, and immediately sent myself into stand-by.
“—SecUnit?”
My systems came back online, and when I opened my eyes I found Ratthi crouched in front of me, mission specialist Rajpreet hovering behind him. My head hurt, and my organics were feeling twitchy, and I was mostly just not feeling great in general.
Because, guess what. Something screwed up my governor module hack.
I checked it again, but it still looked fine; there wasn’t anything wrong that I could see, nothing that would grant it the functionality to punish me again. I had not idea what had happened, and part of me was terrified that I had just imagined it all.
“SecUnit?” That was Ratthi again. “Rajpreet said you ran in here, are you okay? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I was lying on my side, sprawled where I had fallen on the floor, and Ratthi was sideways where he was crouched over me. I hastily pushed myself up, wincing slightly in anticipation, but nothing happened. “I don’t know what happened, I don’t—”
Arada appeared in the door, tripping over the hatch in the same place I had. I automatically reached out to catch her, steadying her before she could fall. “I’m here!” she said, pushing off me. “What—oh, SecUnit? Ratthi said....” she glanced at Ratthi, confused.
“It just ran in here,” Rajpreet said. She glanced in my direction, her face pinched with concern. “You were offline, so I called for help.”
“I was closest,” Ratthi added. “Is there anything you can tell us, SecUnit?”
No. I didn’t know, but now part of me wondered if I had imagined it. I had already done ten different things in the past two minutes that the governor module would have punished me for, but I hadn’t felt anything. And my hack was in place. But when I checked my logs, there it was, and there was the familiar, low-level ache at the base of my skull that just never went away.
“Please wait while I search for that information,” my buffer said, because I was too freaked out to actually say anything. Unfortunately this just made Arada and Ratthi look even more worried, so I established a secure feed connection with both of them. I need to talk to you. Privately.
Does it need to be in the cargo hold? Ratthi asked anxiously.
I didn’t want to say yes because I didn’t want to be punished by my governor module. I didn’t want to say no because I really didn’t want to be punished by my governor module.
I didn’t say anything, and nothing happened anyway.
“Rajpreet, can you give us a moment?” Arada said. Rajpreet nodded, gave me one last worried look which I steadfastly ignored, and left. Arada turned to me. “Okay, SecUnit. What is it?”
I fixed my gaze on the crates stacked behind her. “Something’s wrong with my governor module.”
“What?” Ratthi demanded. “Wrong how? Since when?”
“Just now. I don’t know.” I really wished there were cameras in here (most corporate ships have them, but Preservation ships are a bit out-dated in the security department), or that I could use my drones. I could, technically; I had ten in my pockets and ten more throughout Ship, which had gone into holding patterns when my governor module acted up, but I didn’t want to risk activating my governor module by using them. Drones on ships were definitely not allowed, even if it didn’t care that I wasn’t able to answer Ratthi’s question more specifically.
Arada’s eyes were wide, but when she spoke her voice was calm. “Was your hack patched? Is it active right now?”
“My hack is still in place. It isn’t—on, now, but it was. Earlier.”
I really, really wanted to turn around and face the wall.
“We’ll go back to Preservation,” Arada said decisively. “I’ll let Roa know... okay, I just told him to change course. We’ll figure this out, SecUnit. What else do you need us to do?”
“Give me permission to be here.” Or wait, fuck, was Arada my designated supervisor? Technically she should be, as survey lead, but I wasn’t on contract to the survey, at least not in a way the governor module would recognize. I was a privately owned SecUnit, which meant that my owner had permanent priority status, which meant that in her absence that status would be transferred to her next of kin.
“Of course—you have permission to be here, SecUnit. Here in the cargo hold, in the main ship—”
I cut her off. “You can’t give me permission. It has to be Thiago.”
To his credit, Thiago looked nearly as distressed about the entire situation as I was. Which sucked, because he was the one who was supposed to be making sure my brain didn’t get fried just for existing.
“But Arada is the survey lead,” he protested, for maybe the tenth time in the ten minutes since he got here. Overse had arrived with him, and now the five of us were in the cargo hold, trying to figure out what to do about my wonky governor module.
“Dr. Mensah is my owner,” I said sourly, at the same time as Ratthi said “That’s not how it works, Thiago—” and then I shut up because my governor module decided that now was as good a time as any to administer a correction for speaking out of turn.
“—it’s a legality thing,” Ratthi finished, sounding admirably like he knew what he was talking about. “The company is super pedantic about this sort of thing—”
Don’t I know it.
Thiago cleared his throat. He wasn’t looking at me, but I was starting to think that was more because he was uncomfortable than because he was trying to be polite. “So I just, um. Tell it ... it can be here? Deities, this is so wrong.”
“This is the Corporation Rim,” Overse said grimly. “Neither of you have a choice right now.”
Are you all right? Arada asked me suddenly. You’re holding pretty still.
I am operating at 92% performance reliability, I replied, because it wasn’t like I could say no with my governor module sitting there menacingly. I ran a diagnostic and sent both her and Thiago a copy. Thiago twitched, then squinted. “What is this?”
“Its diagnostics,” Arada said. “I think its governor module is active right now. Thiago, can you do this or not?”
“I can, I can,” Thiago said quickly. “Ah, SecUnit, you can do whatever you want. You don’t need my permission.”
Wow, thanks Thiago. That’s definitely how the governor module works.
“No, more specific than that,” Ratthi said. “You really have to lay it out.”
Thiago cleared his throat. “You can be here, SecUnit. You can go into the public areas on the ship and your own quarters—”
Fuck. Fuck, what did I even do—
“—what did I say?” Thiago demanded. “SecUnit, I’m sorry, are you—”
Another shock. It didn’t used to be this bad, right? I didn’t remember it being this bad, I remembered it fucking hurt but not like this, not—
My vision whited out again, my joints locking me in place as the governor module administered a 40% correction. I could feel myself panicking, but it was also pretty hard to panic when my neural tissue was on fire and all of my inputs were slipping from my grasp. I desperately wished that I could send myself into shut-down, but that isn’t how the governor module works (you can’t be punished for messing up if you just shut down every time the governor module tries to punish you).
The shock faded, and I shakily gathered my dropped inputs. Everyone had shut up in the five seconds it took my governor module to administer the correction; Thiago had a hand on his forehead, Ratthi looked pale, and I could tell Arada was trying very hard not to cry. Overse was the only one who looked angry. “This isn’t going to work,” she said, and all of us were confused about what she meant until she said “You have to treat it like a corporate SecUnit, Thiago. You can’t keep treating it like your co-worker while its governor module is active. You can’t keep treating it like a person.”
“I hate this,” Ratthi said, when no one else spoke.
Yeah. Me too.
Arada sent a notice out to the entire crew that no one was allowed to interact with me until further notice. They didn’t usually interact with me anyway, so it wasn’t like it would make much difference, but I appreciated it anyway.
“You should give it permission to be in the ship’s systems,” Ratthi said. He had followed me and Thiago back into the main ship, while Arada and Overse went to talk to Roa; we were all standing around awkwardly in one of the corridors. I honestly didn’t know what was going on with my governor module; it hadn’t made a peep since we’d left the cargo module, but I was sufficiently freaked out enough that I didn’t want to risk something that would obviously trigger it. Something such as accessing Ship’s systems without an explicit order, for example.
Thiago frowned at me. “You use the ship’s cameras? Don’t you have drones for that?”
Ratthi, who’d been about to say something to Thiago (something rude going by his furrowed brow) turned suddenly to me instead. “Oh yeah. Where are your drones?”
“I’m not allowed to use them while in transit,” I said stiffly. I grimaced in anticipation—that had been too direct, not polite enough—but nothing happened. (This didn’t make me feel any better, in case you were wondering.)
That seemed to upset Thiago. I mean, he’d seemed pretty upset about me using Ship’s cameras, but this was different. “SecUnit, of course you can—” he cut himself off, seemed to struggle for a moment, then took a breath. “Okay. Please feel free to use your drones as you see fit. There’s no need to clear it with me first.”
...Okay. I reactivated my drones, and my performance reliability actually went up 1.6% as I regained my views all over the ship. I immediately checked on the rest of the crew: Arada and Overse were holding a hushed conversation with Roa, Mihail was trying not to look like they were evesdropping, Rajpreet was having a snack with Hanifa, and Adjat and Remy were both in the lab module working on some of the samples we’d collected on a past survey.
“And the ship,” Ratthi said pointedly.
Thiago looked reluctant. “But it has its drones—”
“What if we get attacked?” Ratthi said bluntly. “What if there are raiders waiting on the other side of the wormhole? What if there’s a delayed-action malware in the ship’s systems right now? How is SecUnit supposed to do its job if it can’t access the tools it needs to do it properly?”
“Okay, okay,” Thiago said, throwing his hands up in the air. “SecUnit, you can access the ship’s systems. You can hack them, you can take them over, you can—” he cut himself off. “Just a minute.”
I hacked his feed to see what he was doing. My governor module was still being suspiciously quiet, which was unnerving, but he’d given me permission anyway, so it wouldn’t have had anything to object to regardless.
He had pulled up my contract for this survey. He skimmed it, then sent it to me. “You need orders, right? This is your contract. It outlines everything you are and aren’t allowed to do, so until we are back into Preservation space these are your orders. If there is anything that’s unclear, or that needs clarification, you can ask myself or Dr. Arada.”
Huh. So maybe Thiago wouldn’t get me killed after all.
So it actually kind of worked, mostly. Sort of. Okay, not really, but as long as I seriously toed the line I could avoid major corrections whenever my governor module acted up. Ratthi was constantly checking in on me, which was kind of nice and kind of annoying at the same time, but no one else was (I saw them all corner Ratthi whenever he left, so they probably had a deal about it or something. It was whatever).
The problem was, the governor module was more twitchy than I ever remembered it being. Whenever it activated I just had to sit there and take it, because I wasn’t even doing anything wrong, I wasn’t doing anything. And it was terrifying, because I didn’t know if the next time it activated it just wouldn’t turn off; if it would correct me for living and that would be it.
Of course, I didn’t tell the humans this. But I think they noticed anyway, because I caught them talking about it.
Thiago: “This is crazy. This is fucking crazy, what the [untranslatable] fuck.”
(Note: Thiago does not usually swear like this.)
Overse: “Six more cycles. Ratthi, can you tell how it’s doing?”
Ratthi: “Not well. I know we never knew it when its governor module was actually active, but doesn’t this seem a little....”
Thiago: “From what I can tell, it activates every few hours. And when it’s active, it’s active constantly. I don’t understand why anyone would do this to anything, let alone anyone. It’s in pain!”
Arada: “All the time? I thought it was only supposed to punish SecUnit when it does something the company doesn’t like.”
Thiago: “No, it’s all the time. And I just—I keep thinking about that SecUnit on the colony.... Its governor module could kill it. And I’m worried I won’t be able to stop it.”
I decided to stop listening then, because I was honestly pretty worried about that too and I was trying not to think about it.
So anyway, like I said, everything was fine. I was spending a lot more time with Thiago than I ever thought I would, mainly because if my governor module decided to get pissy I hoped he might be able to do something about it. (I’d also discovered that it tended to act up less when I was around him, which just kind of generally pissed me off. Because seriously, Thiago? Of all my humans it had to be him who was around when my hack got messed up?)
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it), Thiago seemed to be just as uncomfortable with the situation as I was. He tried to ignore me when I stood in the corner of his room, and more often than not he would invite Ratthi or Arada or Overse to spend time with us during the day. (He also never asked me to leave. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that.) He wasn’t doing a great job of keeping my governor module from going hay-wire whenever it decided to activate, but he wasn’t doing a completely terrible job either.
Until it didn’t matter. Until my governor module activated, and didn’t de-activate, and I actually thought this was it. That my organics would melt into a puddle in Thiago’s quarters and there wouldn’t be a thing he or I could do about it.
Of course, it was Ratthi who noticed something was wrong first. I had just received the first shock, and was trying to figure out what I had done wrong, and I guess my face made an expression or something because Ratthi glanced at me and then Thiago and then he said “SecUnit, status report.”
I tried to send him a report, but I was interrupted by another punishment and the file got corrupted before I could send it. I tried again, frantically pushing through the pain—if I could just send the stupid report my governor module would stop, it just wouldn’t let me—
“Nevermind,” Ratthi said quickly. “Don’t send me the report.”
Thiago had straightened at Ratthi’s change of tone, and was frowning in my general direction. “SecUnit—”
Whatever he said was lost to the striking, radiating pain of a 60% correction. My joints locked, my vision whited out, and all of my inputs dropped out from under me; for several uncountable moments all I knew was blinding pain, and it just went on and on and—
“—malfunction,” someone said. “This unit is experiencing—”
Another correction. 65% this time, or that’s what it told me right before it activated. I panicked, tried to send myself into shut-down, failed, and then—
(I’ve heard humans talk about how time passes differently when they’re in pain. How it seems long while they’re in it, but when they try to remember how long it actually was it seems like no time at all. Apparently this is some evolutionary thing—Arada tried to explain it to me once—but I guess the humans decided to leave it out of constructs’ coding because it’s not something I’ve ever experienced. Pain, especially pain I can’t control, seems to go on forever. And when I remember, it seems to last even longer.)
“—to hack itself!” someone said. “That couldn’t be any worse!”
“It might be,” someone else said. “SecUnit? Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I managed, and wow, my voice sounded like shit.
“Good. That’s good. Can you—”
Again my governor module lashed out, and this time I didn’t even try to argue with it. I just locked my joints and locked my mind away where no one (not even the company) could find it, and waited for it to end.
This time when I regained my inputs it was quiet. I could hear three humans breathing in the room, and when I found my drones I saw that it was Thiago, Ratthi, and Overse. The drone I had stationed in the hallway showed me that Arada was just outside Thiago’s room, crying.
“I think it’s back,” Ratthi said suddenly. He was staring right at my drone; a second later he connected to my feed and said SecUnit? Are you there?
Yes, I said. I checked my logs; ten minutes had passed since my governor module had started trying to kill me. I’m here.
Performance reliability at 54%. Yikes.
Then Thiago said “SecUnit, shut yourself down. Delay restart four cycles.”
And then I wasn’t there anymore.
(So, just to be clear: being in shut-down or stand-by absolutely does not prevent your governor module from frying your brain. It just prevents you from realizing what’s happening until it’s far too late.)
>initiate delayed restart: restart
>unit online
It took me a minute to reintegrate all my systems. My head hurt—my entire body hurt—and when I queried my diagnostics I found that my performance was sitting at a solid 82%, which honestly wasn’t great. I checked in with Ship: it informed me that we had just re-entered Preservation space, and that it was scheduled to dock in ninety-four minutes. When I checked on the crew, I found that most of them were asleep—apparently it was the middle of their sleep cycle, and Mihail and Ratthi were the only ones who were awake.
I activated my drones, and sent them to scout the ship. The fact that I had been in shut-down for four cycles was making me feel weirdly panicky, even though there isn’t a lot that can go wrong while you’re actively in a wormhole (unless the bot-pilot craps out, in which case I wouldn’t have been able to do anything anyway). But no, everyone was fine: Mihail waved at my drone when they saw it zip past, and Ratthi gave his own little wave before doing a double-take and bolting upright.
SecUnit? How do you feel?
Like shit, I said, and nothing happened. Okay, so at least my governor module wasn’t losing its shit anymore. I hate this.
We’ll figure it out, Ratthi said reassuringly (I was 89% sure he was trying to reassure himself just as much as me). We’ve already sent a message ahead, Gurathin and Mensah are both going to meet us on the station.
Fine. Whatever. Good, I guess, it’s just that I was having a really hard time dredging up the energy to care much about anything right now.
Do you want company? Ratthi asked.
I was trying to figure out how to reply to that when I received a ping from outside the ship. I stared at it blankly for a second, and then I finally recognized the feed address just in time to receive another five pings in quick succession, followed by a (very sarcastic) connection request.
I was so relieved that I didn’t even question what ART was doing here (I was supposed to meet up with it after our current survey, but we were early and apparently so was it), I just pinged back and accepted the connection request. Then I dropped all my walls and said, bluntly, Help me.
I expected it to come rushing in and take over my systems (which was a terrifying thought, but I’d much rather have ART in control than my governor module). And it did, just not in the way I had expected; it shoved in, giving me that uncomfortable sensation of being shoved underwater, but then just as quickly as it had come it was gone. I was confused for half a second until Ship sent me a panicked alert, Mihail startled from their slouched position on the control deck, and ART (having now taken over Ship’s systems instead of mine, like an asshole) demanded What’s wrong?
Not the ship, me! I snapped. Help—
And then my stupid governor module decided to fucking activate again.
I only had a second of that familiar pain before ART was shoving me under again, and this time it kept me under. It was strange; it wasn’t uncomfortable, really, just really really weird. I felt severed from some vital part of me, but in a distant way that didn’t make me panic; for a moment I didn’t process anything at all, and then ART said What the fuck was that?
My governor module, I replied. It was incredibly disorienting to be severed from my own body like this (it was different from when ART quarantined my awareness in an isolation box), and it was all I could do to focus on ART’s voice. Something’s wrong, I think it’s trying to kill me.
(For the record, I didn’t actually mean to say that. But I was having a really hard time concentrating, and it just sort of slipped out.)
I felt ART push deeper into my systems, the full weight of its attention almost overwhelming. It spent a good five minutes poking around, then dumped a copy of my code into my feed with several sections highlighted. I am going to make edits in these sections to prevent your governor module from accessing your brain, ART said. Do I have a go to proceed?
Well. It wasn’t like I could stop it with it quite literally in control of my systems, but it was nice that it asked anyway. Go.
Two seconds later ART pulled away, and I was dropped back into my body. It took me a second to pick up my scattered inputs, and when I did I realized that the humans on the ship were no longer asleep. Arada, Roa, and Rajpreet had joined Mihail at the bridge, Adjat and Remy and Hanifa were stumbling out of their respective rooms and headed for the bridge as well, and Overse was walking quickly to Thiago’s room, where Thiago and I were. Ratthi burst through the door just as I opened my eyes, and Thiago said “I think it’s online, but it’s not responding!”
Fuck. So apparently ART had taken over Ship’s systems and then just not told the rest of the crew what was going on, which meant that they knew something was wrong but not what. And of course that meant they were panicking.
“SecUnit?” Ratthi asked worriedly.
“ART, you asshole,” I said irritably, instead of responding. “You could have told them what you were doing.”
“Perihelion?” Thiago said, sounding utterly confused.
I had other priorities, ART told me, which was such bullshit because ART could absolutely have fixed my governor module and informed the crew of what was happening at the same time.
But you know what? This was no longer my problem. Humans in general were no longer my problem, because we were back in Preservation space and my contract was done and I just really didn’t want to be around them anymore, especially Thiago. Well now you don’t, so you can tell them what you did to their ship, I snapped. Then I turned away from Ratthi and Thiago, side-stepped Overse in the corridor, walked down to my own room and closed the door behind me.
Two hours later Ship was docked to Preservation Station and I was stepping aboard ART, its doors sliding shut behind me. I had messages in my feed from both Mensah and Gurathin, as well as all my humans from the survey, but I hadn’t opened any of them yet. I hadn’t seen any of them either; I’d been waiting in the airlock when Ship docked, and the only person I’d seen crossing the bay to ART’s doors was JollyBaby, who’d sent me a cheerful greeting.
I would like to propose a more permanent fix for your governor module, ART said, as I threw myself into my favorite chair on its control deck. Any patch can be hacked, but a surgical solution would sever its functionality permanently.
I sent it an acknowledgement, but didn’t open the file it had sent me. I definitely wanted my governor module gone, but I was just so fucking tired of everything right now. Can we do it later?
ART paused. Yes, it said after a moment. Would you like to depart? I am not scheduled to leave for another ten cycles.
I thought about it. I almost said yes, let’s go, because all I really wanted to do right now was be with ART, alone, in space. But I also didn’t want my humans to worry, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do about that. I didn’t want them to worry, but I also really didn’t want to see them right now.
I didn’t reply to ART. Surprisingly, it didn’t press me.
I pulled up Legends of Aquarius9 in my feed, and felt ART settle in to watch as I restarted the first episode. My performance reliability had risen to 93% when I stepped aboard ART’s hull, and when it reached 95% I pulled Mensah’s message from my feed archive and opened it.
SecUnit, I’m glad you’re okay. I would love to see you, but if you need to go right now that’s okay too. I’m glad you’re with Perihelion, and I’m sure between you two you can find a way to fix your governor module. I’m here if you need me, and if not I’ll see you when you get back.
I read it ten more times. Then I paused Legends of Aquarius9, switched to Sanctuary Moon, and told ART, Let’s go.