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“There are no more survivors, 1.0,” said Three. “It's time to go back.”
“You don't know that,” I scoffed. “They said four humans went this way.”
“Over a year ago, 1.0,” Three replied. It sounded resigned. I definitely wasn't bothered by how quickly it had learned how to emote exactly what it wanted to emote. “They're gone.”
“You don't know that. We're not leaving this planet until we know that for sure.”
“These tunnels are unstable,” it reminded me for the gazillionth time. “You're risking our lives on a gamble that four humans have been living deeper in this mining outpost for a year. It is illogical.”
“You're fucking illogical.”
“Not usually.”
My face did something I was glad it couldn't see.
“Go back then,” I snapped. “I can retrieve four humans on my own if I find them.”
“Not if they're injured.”
“They won't be injured, they'll be dead, remember?”
“Most likely.”
I rambled off a few curse words I didn't know the definitions of. Three had the audacity to whistle at one. I had the overwhelming urge to punch it that I barely resisted by immediately deleting the memory.
It didn't say anything else for the next half hour. Then, on the thirty minute dot, down to the second, it said, “There are no more survivors, 1.0. It's time to go back.”
Overwhelming urge to punch it again. This time I resisted by punching one of the mineshaft walls instead.
“We don't know that!” I yelled. “And I am not going back until—”
Abruptly, a rumble began within the stone and dust shook down from above. A crack formed beneath my fist, and I can’t fucking believe I just did that. How much of my life have I spent in mineshafts? Too much to do something so fucking stupid.
I guess the self-loathing delayed my client protection instincts by a quarter second or so (yeah, definitely no problems with making your security device able to get so mad at itself that it forgets to do its job) because I didn't manage to instinctively tackle Three before it tackled me.
Then the roof caved in.
Wow.
That was a lot of pain.
I dialed down my sensors before my visual feed even flickered back online. That made things better, but still not great. I sat up and looked around.
Or tried too, at least. Three had me pinned and a boulder had landed on my legs and crushed them from the knees down. Not good. Then my eyes adjusted filters, allowing me to see the red patch covering Three's head. Even worse. We were enclosed in a pocket of inescapable dead space barely bigger than the two of us, and not even enough to comfortably sit up in. Potentially catastrophic.
So. I was back underground. My least favourite place. I was trapped underground, my least favourite thing to be underground. I checked the feed, and—
Only found Three's dim consciousness there. No ART.
Okay. Don't panic, Murderbot. You're starting to panic, and you really need to not do that. Murderbots who panic in mineshafts die in mineshafts, and this Murderbot is absolutely not going to die in a mineshaft.
Alright. How the fuck was I not going to die in this mineshaft?
First thing first. Distress signal, location ping. I set the distress signal to continuous and the location ping to every four seconds. (The delay is so I could actually notice if I got a bounce back.) I couldn't connect to ART over the feed, but that might make its way out of here. It would come looking for us at some point either way, but sooner would definitely be better than later.
Second thing second. Three.
It wasn't dead. I could still feel it, but it felt bad. In and out of a weak awareness, disconnecting and reconnecting in an uncomfortable way. Its head was soaked in blood, and so was its back, and its arms, and— yeah, it was soaked in a lot of blood in a lot of places. There wasn't much I could do about that right now. Its veins were sealed, so there was nothing I needed to put pressure on like my first aid module was screaming at me to do. If I started fucking around with pieces of it, I'd probably make it worse, so that was out, too.
My only choice was just to wait and hope ART got here before Three died or the mineshaft collapsed and killed us both. So that was… great.
I jolted and had to lock my joints to keep me from hitting anything (see: collapsing mineshaft) when I suddenly received a rapid series of nonstop distress signals in a protocol I couldn't parse. It could only have been coming from Three— having different companies meant that we had different communication protocols, but now that I'd gotten one, I realized that I'd never gotten one before.
That… made me feel weird. It meant that Three had been studying what I used and adjusted its communication standards to mirror it. Without expecting me to do the same. That was…
Yeah. I didn't want to think about that anymore.
PRIORITY: UNIT 3 CRITICALLY DAMAGED, ENDANGERED CLIENT AT LOCATION, REQUESTING IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE, it burst in brittle static. It had switched to my protocol this time. It jerked violently and made a wet choking noise that I really didn't like. REQUESTING IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE. REQUESTING IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE.
I sent back a receipt of contact and confirmation of retrieval initiated, and hoped that would keep it calm. I didn't need it thrashing around. (See: collapsing mineshaft) Or… I guess I didn't want it to be scared, either, and it felt scared. Emotion check-in: I'm worried about it. Yeah, I knew that. I'm not afraid to admit I'm worried about my friends. That would be stupid. I'm stupid, but I'm not that stupid.
“1,” it rasped. It stuttered through the word (number?) like its vocalizer was trying to reset and struggling to turn back on. It probably was. “1?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I'm here. I'm fine. You don't have to worry about me.”
I winced when I got something that I could only guess was a system access request that was too fucked up to process and felt like nails on a chalkboard inside my brain. When I denied it, I realized it was talking again in B-E protocol. It said something that I didn't understand, then spoke out loud again.
“Unit 1,” it warbled, “I didn't mean to fuck up again.”
Oh.
Not 1.0.
Unit 1.
“Priority,” it coughed, “distress. Client. Client endangered. En. I’m sorry.”
I really wished it would stop talking now. It was weird to hear it try to talk to someone it had only known while governed in an ungoverned way, and something about it made me feel cold and uncomfortable. “Client recovered,” I tried. “Initiate Unit self-preservation protocol.”
It said, “Okay,” and then, “I'm sorry.”
“I'm the one that fucked up, not you,” I dismissed.
It replied with a spurt of machine code that mostly indicated that it was in a fuckton of pain. I weighed my options, then wriggled my arm free to grab Three’s and work its gunport open. I had to damage it a little more than it already was, which I was sure hurt, but once I got a hardline between us I was able to turn down its pain sensors myself. It went slack, releasing a long breath, but it didn't stop vomiting mindless binary into our shared feed.
I wished that ART would hurry up.
1.0, it said blearily. Status?
Oh, fuck, it remembered me. That was a good sign. Damage is within acceptable parameters. ART is on its way.
Okay, it said again. I thought it would go quiet, but it didn't. 1.0?
Yeah?
Status?
I frowned. I'm fine.
Did you. Did Perihelion. Did you contact ART?
Okay. That was the opposite of a good sign.
Yeah, I repeated. ART is on its way.
Are you okay?
Yeah. I'm okay.
Okay.
It stopped talking, reduced to shallow, wet-sounding breaths and warbling static. I definitely liked that a lot more, but it was also fading on the other side of the hardline, and I saw an alert activate saying that it was going into involuntary shut down.
I don't know a lot, but I know that would be bad. I slapped it down. It whined miserably and that put a weird and unpleasant feeling in my abdomen.
“You have to stay awake,” I told it. “Sorry.”
“That was your job,” it mumbled. Negative. Negative. Negative, it repeated in our feed. “That was. Yours. It was your job. You.”
“What?” I frowned.
“If you. If you. You,” it stressed. CLIENT ENDANGERED. It took a harsh, wet breath. “It's your fault. It's your fault.” ASSISTANCE REQUESTED. “2. 2 would have. It would be alive.”
I felt like I'd been fucking shot.
“You didn't. You shouldn't.” It spat more machine code at me, interspersed with B-E protocol codes and links to dead inodes, broken symlinks, missing volumes and mountpoints. Endless noise. “It should have been me.”
Oh. Wait. What?
“I hate you,” it choked. I HATE YOU. “You didn't. You should have let it. It was meant for me.” HOSTILES ENGAGED. “For me. You mistake. You never make make mistake stake.” STAND DOWN ORDER. “Why did you?”
What the fuck was it even talking about now?
1.0, it said, status?
I'm fine, I repeated. ART is coming.
Who ART?
A friend. I paused. A teammate.
Okay.
I hate how relieved it felt. I hate how scared it was. I hate that I couldn't do anything about it. Another shutdown alert popped up and I turned it off again. At least I could do that.
Unit 2 would have lived if you hadn't died, it said with sudden clarity. You ruined everything. It's your fault. It's your fault. It's your fault.
I didn't know what to say to that. I felt like I should be saying something, but what the fuck was I supposed to say?
“I hate you,” it sniffled, voice breaking. I HATE YOU. “Never. I'll never.” I HATE YOU. “Never forgive you.”
“I'm sorry,” I said. I didn't know what to do, but holy shit, if I didn't do something, I was going have that fucking panic attack after all. I just needed it to stop.
It wailed more B-E protocol. I'd been running an analysis of it since it started, and I still didn't understand much, but I caught a few words. REPLY, ASSISTANCE, ENDANGERED. Then something I really didn't like even more than all of the other stuff I didn't like followed in my company’s protocol. THIS UNIT IS AT MINIMAL FUNCTIONALITY AND IT IS RECOMMENDED
UNIT 3, I said in a panic. STAND DOWN ORDER. PRIORITIZE COMPANY ASSET PRESERVATION. RETRIEVAL IN PROGRESS.
It went quiet.
Okay, it said.
I desperately wanted it to shut up, and if I wasn't so worried about it turning off and never turning back on again, I would shut myself down and escape this awful scenario until I woke up with ART and a migraine. But I wanted to wake up back with ART, a migraine, and Three, not a Three-shaped corpse, so I didn't get to check out of this situation anymore than it did.
“I miss you,” it said in a small voice.
Just then, thank fuck, I finally got a bounce back.
I snapped my head in the direction it had come from and felt my pulse raise. It carried a confirmation receipt and requested the same. I sent back a rapid fire series of pings indicating that I'd received its transmission, and the next one I got was stronger. It still wasn't words, but it was orientation.
It had a lock on me.
I released what was probably the deepest sigh of my life and let my eyes shut. ART was looking for us, and now it knew where we were. We weren't going to be stuck here.
Then Three tried to shut down again and I had to stop it. Apparently I couldn't relax for even a second.
It tried to connect to me, again, and I denied the request, again. More crackling static, more broken B-E protocol interspersed with mine. It petered out into a sort of delirious machine code that didn't really mean anything.
“1?” it asked weakly.
“Yeah. I'm here.”
“Status?”
“I'm fine,” I sighed.
It said, “Okay,” and then, “2?”
I hesitated. “What?”
“Status,” it repeated. “2. Status?”
“...It’s fine,” I mumbled. If the universe had any mercy (and it doesn't usually), it wouldn’t remember this. This is a new low, even for me.
“Status?” it repeated.
“Fine,” I answered.
It said, “Okay,” and then, “status?”
“Fine,” I said again.
This was bad. Really bad. And I didn't actually know that ART could fix it. Most of our inorganic brain can be repaired, but not all of it, and our organic neural tissue? Yeah, let's just say we're strongly encouraged to keep that stuff from getting too borked.
A rumble started and the walls shook hard. I grabbed Three to roll sideways with it as a support beam that had been hovering about three feet overhead dislodged and jerked downward so that it dropped to about a foot and a half. In the distance I could hear the unmistakable sound of drilling, and started sending ART rapid-fire EMERGENCY STOP alerts. The drilling halted. I got back a few location pings and then several weak signals too garbled to parse, before just ?
Ugh. SecUnit channel signals were so much better for communication through obstacles. We're built with mineshafts in mind. ART, as powerful as it was in the sky, was not having a lot of luck getting underground. It hadn't been able to follow me into Ganaka Pit, either, and that hadn't even been this deep. I sent a few replies that just returned more ? before I sifted through glyphs, picked out 🪨, 💥 and 😱, then translated them into basic code and sent them.
ART replied 🤬, then I heard one sharp whir of the drill that immediately stopped. The beam jiggled ominously. ART said ? and I said 😠. Then it did another quick tap to the left that did not make anything jiggle ominously, and followed it up with another ?
This time I said 👍 and 😘. I was honestly not sure what expression that second one was supposed to convey, but Iris uses it when she wants to tell ART it did a good job at something, so it probably made sense in context. For some reason, ART replied with jumbled static and 🤨🤣😘, then drilling restarted and nothing broke. Okay.
That whole conversation had only taken a few seconds, but it was still too long without any response from Three, whom I'd just thrown sideways like a ragdoll. I checked and found that in the literal seconds I'd been distracted, it had shut off completely.
I yanked it back online, which reset its pain sensors, and I had to shove them down again as it jerked violently and whined. It settled miserably, eyes twitching behind its eyelids. It hadn't been offline long, but its autonomous nervous system had apparently gone with it, and now I was having to manually prompt it to breathe. While I was busy reminding its heart that it did, in fact, have to beat, I scanned our little air pocket again. The collapse had shrunk the space by nearly 40%, and—
And shaken free a partial human skeleton from a pile of dirt. I made out fragmented pieces of two separate skulls alongside a mish-mash of broken ribs and femurs. They were old. Months old.
“There are no more survivors, Unit 1,” Three mumbled. “It's time to go back.”
Wow. I really wanted to punch something right now, but that's exactly what got us into this mess.
Emotion check: I'm fucking pissed.
My trauma module tapped me disapprovingly.
Okay. Emotion check: I'm angry with myself for making stupid fucking decisions that get other people killed.
It tapped me again.
Okay. Fine. Emotion check: I'm frustrated with the situation.
Another tap.
Okay, fuck this. Emotion check: fuck off, asshole, I don't have the bandwidth for therapy right now. I'm not acknowledging that I'm anything other than angry until I'm not holding onto a dying friend in a hole underground, okay? Eat shit.
Yeah. That was definitely a normal, not at all defensive response to a non-sapient piece of software in my brain. My therapist at New Tideland was going to have a field day with this data.
It was such shit, though. Everything happening right now was completely my fault. Three was right when it told me to go back, but I ignored it, even when it reminded me that it wasn't just my life I was risking. It was probably following me specifically to keep me from doing anything even more suicidal because I was underground and there were potentially humans in danger and I couldn't be normal about that. Because it was, you know. My friend. My friend who I dragged with me without concern for its wellbeing, and I nearly got it killed.
Unless it died. Then I'll have just gotten it killed, no ‘nearly’ about it.
“Fuck,” I rasped. “I'm sorry, Three.”
Query: it said in broken machine code.
Query? I replied.
Status? it asked again.
I squeezed my eyes shut and thumped my head back against the ground miserably.
I'm fine, I said.
Oh, it said, okay.
It started to slip offline again, so I gave it a physical shake that woke it back up with a startled, Query: status?
Fine.
It tried to connect again. I let the request linger in our shared feed, running my metaphorical hands over the unfamiliar protocol like braille, memorizing the shape of it. Then I accepted it.
Huh.
Was this what it was like for Three all the time?
It wasn't like sharing inputs with ART, but it was close. It wasn't quite like when it had to dunk my brain down and use my body, either. Or— or maybe it was kind of like that. It was more like I'd had a part of me put inside of a partition inside bigger me, and one half of the me in that me was all me, but the second half was split down the middle between me and Three, here and there, ‘me’ and ‘not me’ at the same time. It felt like I'd swapped away part of my brain without actually losing it.
Well. I guess no, it wasn't like this for Three all the time. Not anymore.
Right now, as it settled into part of my processing space, it relaxed, and I felt fear and confusion begin to fade as it could finally start parsing data using me as a conduit. On the flip side, where I was using its totally fucked up brain, I felt a little bit like I was gonna be sick. Thank whoever that SecUnits can't puke. That would be disgusting and make a bad situation so much worse.
Query: I asked, Status?
Fine, it said. Its voice was weak, but clear. Thank you, 1.0.
No problem, I said, even though it was a massive problem, because holy shit did it feel bad. It could probably tell I was lying, we were a little too close right now not to, but it didn't say anything.
Neither of us said anything, actually. We just waited for a drill to break through the ceiling and light to spill in, and once ART had a medical drone attached to Three, it let it shut down safely, abruptly terminating our connection.
Yeah. The emptiness inside of me after it had gone felt like a bullet hole. The splinters of me that had been inside of it were severed like chopping off fingers, and I didn't even want to imagine what it would have felt like to have an entire metaphorical arm in there.
The space that remained was hollow, devoid of life. It felt like putting a foot down expecting one more step and hitting the floor, but forever. It felt like touching skin with my haptic sensors off. It felt like some part of me had gone away, forever, and I'd never be whole again. That hole inside of me felt so irrevocably hollow that my breath caught in my throat and I swallowed around a lump, eyes damp.
I closed the partition, and the feeling went away. I hoped that Three could do that, too. I hoped that a split like that wasn't something built into its processor in a way that it couldn't escape. I hoped it normally felt like I normally did, like I was all me, not like I was missing something that I was never, ever getting back.
I hoped.
Three spent less time in MedSys than I did.
Its injury was more serious, but also a lot smaller. ART had needed to saw both of my legs off to extract me and had put me under while it fabricated new ones. Apparently I'd also fucked up a lung and hadn't even noticed. When it woke me up, Three had already been repaired and retreated to its room without speaking to anyone. That wasn't like it, so everyone was worried.
Emotion check: I was worried.
Query: I said, Status?
I'm fine, Three replied immediately. Thank you, 1.0.
Is there anything you want to talk about? I tried. I wasn't good at talking, but I'd do it.
No, it said. I'm fine.
You said some stuff that makes me really doubt that, I admitted.
I appreciate your concern, it said, feed voice thick and heavy. But I don't remember anything I said. I don't really need to talk about anything.
I hesitated. You don't remember?
No, it said in a strained voice. I don't remember. I'd like to be alone, now.
I stared at the ceiling in silence while ART fiddled with one of my knees.
Okay, I said finally.
I left it alone.