Chapter Text
I found the room in the facility easily enough. It was one of many. Identical little cells with a bed pushed against one wall and hygiene equipment against the other.
The facility was empty now. It had been running with a skeleton of human security staff, and well, they hadn't taken my warning that they should stop shooting at me. I felt bad about that. But they had one of my humans, held here in this shitass detention centre on this shitass moon, and I had given them a chance.
There was no one else being held here. I made sure. Leaving some poor fuck here to die of starvation or run out of power was not something I intended to do. It could hold maybe twenty-five in total, but it honestly looked like it was on its way to being decommissioned.
That was probably why they'd stashed Gurathin here. They didn't think that Preservation Alliance would even know where to look.
Luckily, Preservation Alliance had me.
I followed my schematics, checking each little cell, until I reached my target.
I used the keycard I'd taken off the chief of security, kicked open the door (because it looked badass when Captain Hossein did it), and said, "Could you manage to not get captured for five fucking minutes while I'm off world?"
A little unfair, granted. Pin-Lee had been the target. Gurathin was stupidly good at getting in the way when someone else was going to get hurt. Which was really stupid. Because he was skinny, middle-aged (his descriptor) and squishy, and it definitely wasn't his job to act as a meat shield.
Gurathin didn't really react to the door thudding into the wall behind it, or to my action hero one-liner (I knew he didn't have any taste), but he also didn't even look over to see what the sound was, which, I could admit was a little more concerning.
I scanned over the room, and confirmed that his augments were online, he was awake, and there was no one else lurking in the room, jamming my risk assessment module.
I took a couple of cautious steps forwards.
Gurathin was sitting on the small metal bed. Although, sitting was maybe not the best word to describe it. I made a mental note to download a new thesaurus module.
Gurathin was slumped, boneless, into the corner between bed and wall. One of his legs was curled up beneath him, the other stretched out so that his foot dangled in mid air. Chipped painted fingernails tugged absently at the hem of a printed shirt, which he definitely hadn't been wearing when he'd been snatched from Preservation Station, because it had a Company logo on it.
His head was lolling over to the side, eyes half open, staring off at nothing at all.
"Oh, shit," I said, and lowered my guns.
So, I guess I had seen this before. Not that that made it any better, or pulled my performance reliability up from where it was hovering at 88%.
I had seen the augmented humans, hauled out and held, waiting until they needed to be deployed. It was easiest, I guessed to keep them drugged. To keep them docile.
Augmented humans could be a threat, and as far as I knew (which wasn't much, granted), you couldn't fit a governor module to a human, even an augmented one. But you could drug them until they couldn't run, couldn't speak, couldn't think. Until they weren't really people any more.
I took a few cautious steps over to Gurathin, thinking that it might snap him out of it. His eyes drifted over to me, not really settling.
"Can you hear me?" I said, hoping I was wrong. That maybe his sensory systems were offline. Perhaps he just couldn't hear me, or see me, perhaps he wasn't…
I sent him a ping at the same time. He didn't return it. I sent a remote access request, and then forced the connection when it went unanswered.
I wasn't getting anything through his feed. A blank little command prompt cursor blinking at me. I quickly scanned over the system, and didn't find anything. No working firewalls or security. No open feed chat. No real connection to the feed at all.
His visual and audio systems were functioning perfectly.
And he just wasn't there at all.
"Answer me," I said, as calmly as I could manage. It wasn't very calm at all. "Do you recognise me?"
His eyes swam over me. "Yes."
Ok, one positive.
"Who am I?" I asked. More calmly than before. Go, me.
There was a slightly longer pause this time, and his voice was drifty, but he did eventually answer, "SecUnit."
Great, positive no. 2.
Memories intact.
I didn't know how the Company would be able to delete an augmented human's memories, but I also realised I didn't know shit about how they'd done any of this.
It was fixable. It had to be.
He'd gotten out before. I didn't know much about it, but I knew that.
So it must be fixable.
A dark little voice inside my processor whispered, 'Unless he's never pissed them off this badly before.'
"Ok," I said, "we're getting out of here now."
That felt like the right thing to say. It was the kind of thing Captain Hossein would say anyway…
Gurathin didn't reply.
"Gurathin," I said.
It felt weird to use his name. I never used his name out loud. Not since the survey. He was always 'asshole'.
I didn't want to call him 'asshole' now.
He turned ever so slightly towards me. Still not really looking at me. Normally, that would be ideal…
I had a dark little thought about the kinds of sentences that seemed to be getting through.
"Stand up," I said, and after a moment, unsteadily, he did. Ok, positive no. 3. Able to follow instructions. (Orders). It was a fucking shitty positive. "Follow me."
He did.
We didn't meet any hostiles en route to the transport I'd commandeered. Mainly because I'd already killed most of them.
I hadn't been feeling great about that, but more and more it was feeling pretty justified.
Gurathin followed me. Silently.
That felt wrong. Gurathin didn't do silent. He was a snippy, sarcastic, moody asshole.
I hated that I hated this version.
The transport was waiting, patiently. Exactly where I'd left it. Usually, I'd have made a joke about how rarely my plans ran without a hitch. Now I was just relieved that we had an easy way out.
It wasn't like the rest of this rescue mission had gone without a hitch anyway.
My augmented human's brain was broken, this shitty little transport didn't even have a MedSystem, and as far as I knew, Preservation and the other free planets didn't have specialists in augmentations, because all the designs and software for the augments were proprietary.
Gurathin was the specialist that the different planets called in when they needed him.
So, we were all fucked, I guess.
I led him into the transport, sat him down on one of the flight benches (because that was a thing I apparently had to tell him to do now), and asked the transport as politely as I could to get us the fuck out of here as quickly as possible.
After that I just kind of hovered for a few minutes, because I didn't know what the fuck I was supposed to do. My processor wasn't working properly. I was having so many emotions that I couldn't seem to focus on any of them.
All there was was this big churning hole in my organics and in my head and all I could think about was Mensah and how her expression would shift and then settle and she'd pretend that everything was alright when it wasn't…
It wasn't.
I needed to check whether Gurathin needed medical attention. The transport didn't have a MedSystem, but it did have medkits and I had a rudimentary medical module.
My organics did that stupid twisting thing again. The one that said it was pointless. I couldn't do anything to fix this.
But I had to try.
I went back to where he was sitting. He hadn't moved. He was just gazing around the transport in a kind of empty, directionless way.
It reminded me, suddenly, of the few times I had seen unprogrammed SecUnits. Newly constructed, but without anything in their processors. No orders. No modules. No command prompts.
Functional, but not there.
I wanted to walk away. I wanted to lock myself in the cargo hold and watch media until we docked in two days. I wanted to pass all of this bullshit over to someone else.
I could walk away. Gurathin wouldn't know or even notice. It wouldn't make any difference at all.
I didn't.
"Gurathin," I said, and he did the looking-but-not-looking thing again. "Status report."
A flicker of something creased his face for a microsecond before it was smoothed away again.
He didn't answer.
Ok, so that didn't work.
I guessed the Company didn't give a shit about their augmented humans' statuses.
I fished a hard wire out of one of the storage compartments on the transport. "Can I connect to you?"
I didn't really know why I was asking, it wasn't like…
"Yeah," he said, distantly. That frown again. There and gone.
Huh, ok then…
I sat awkwardly at his side, since humans liked sitting. "Are you…?" I started, and then didn't know how to finish.
'Are you ok?' was the stupidest question in the world right now. 'Are you with me?' was… not a question I really wanted the answer to…
Gurathin hummed. A question, maybe? Or just a noise. Neurons firing on nothing and telling him he should respond to my half-assed question.
I wished I'd paid more attention to the Company augmented humans. The one's who'd been enough of a problem that they were kept like this when the Company didn't have a use for them.
But I hadn't really felt anything about them at the time. Except for maybe pity.
My organic parts contorted inside me. Guilt. Shame. What else was new?
"Plugging in now," I said, just to say something.
He flinched, just a bit, when I brushed his dataport.
I don't know what I was expecting. Just something, I guess. After all, I was plugging into a hostile system. It was extremely likely that the Company had embedded malware or viruses to target unauthorised incursions. But there wasn't anything like that…
There wasn't anything at all.
I could feel it even clearer now than I had in the facility. Just an empty network waiting for an input. I searched around for a few seconds, trying to see if I could find any block between him and his augments. To find out if that was why I couldn't find the weird swampy mush of thoughts and emotions that I usually felt from him.
But there wasn't anything that I could find.
The awful churning in my gut got worse.
"Return internal system diagnostics," I said, as a test more than anything.
I felt him open the file and I skimmed through the report. There was nothing in there I didn't already know. Nothing I could identify as different from the last time I'd run a diagnostic on his system. Except for, you know, the everything…
The system itself was functioning fine. Gurathin just wasn't in it.
There were high levels of several drugs in his bloodstream. I didn't even know what most of them were. A quick feed search told me that there were several sedatives, tranquillisers, antipsychotics, all of which were produced through proprietary manufacture methods. There was also something that apparently had a similar structure to some kind of analgesic but which didn't appear anywhere on any database that I could find.
I closed the report. I had known all that. Having specific chemical compounds might be useful when we reached a medbay, but it didn't mean shit to me.
The main answer I got was that Gurathin had been able to open the file himself.
I decided to try something more complicated.
I read off the transport's ID. "Retrieve communications from the last thirty cycles. Highlight mentions of corporate properties."
He didn't say anything, but I felt him slide into the transport's systems. He was efficient and covert. It was easy. It wasn't like the transport was made for espionage, or to hold secure data. He retrieved the communications records and started reviewing them. For the first time, I felt something sharp and methodical and distinctly Gurathin as he began pulling relevant data.
"Stop," I said. The sharp little thing dropped away again. Swallowed up by all of the nothing.
And Gurathin was thoughtless and empty again.
He was within a standard deviation of his usual response time for data retrieval. He was much slower than I would be, obviously, and a bot could perform tasks like this more efficiently than either of us, so just… use a bot?
I just didn't understand why. There was no reason to do this. It had to be reversible. It had to be. Because why else bother?
It was just… pointlessly cruel. Unless the cruelty was the point…
I felt myself getting angry. I wanted to walk away again, and not have to deal with any of this. I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to be connected to Gurathin at all, ever again, and especially not now.
I disconnected the wire.
"I'm going to check the cargo hold," I said.
I didn't even know why.
I wanted him to respond. To make a sarcastic joke. To argue with me.
He didn't. He didn't do anything at all.
I had intended to watch media and generally check out of the situation, but I couldn't help but keep reviewing the camera feed from the transport's crew area.
Without anything to hold his attention, Gurathin had slumped on the bench, the same as he had in the shitty little cell. I had compared him to a blank construct earlier, but now this was wholly human. A drugged, sick, miserable human.
He was pulling again at the hem of the company-issued shirt he was wearing. A little repetitive tic that didn't accomplish anything. His eyes were half closed, unfocused. Courtesy of all the fucking sedatives I guessed.
I did watch media, but instead of trying to find something to calm me down, I ended up searching for all of the times I'd seen something similar. Not the same as this, obviously. But all of the brainwashing, mind control, magic bullshit that was usually fun to watch because it was so dramatic.
Nothing about this was fun…
I reviewed all of the shows I could find and collated my data.
The storylines usually resolved in one of two ways - 1) Minor physical violence broke through the control, or 2) Characters used interpersonal connections (usually romantic but sometimes platonic or familial connections) to trigger memories.
Fine.
It was better than nothing.
I was built for physical violence more than I was built for 'the power of friendship' so I guessed I'd start there.
I stalked back out into the crew area.
Gurathin didn't react.
In person, I could see that his worrying at the hem of the fabric had caused a few of the threads to fray.
I another felt a wave of anger that I couldn't really find a reason for - beyond, you know, the obvious…
"Gurathin."
He'd slid down even further against the bench. Limp, like he couldn't make his limbs work properly. He didn't sit up when I said his name, but he did look vaguely in my direction again. So great, I guess, he wasn't unconscious.
(I think I'd rather he was unconscious).
Ok, new mission goal: Get my asshole augmented human back with the power of mild violence (and maybe friendship).
It looked uncomfortable, the way he was slumped over himself. I kinda wanted to order him to get up, but that felt cruel, and I… I don't know, it made my organics do something icky and uncomfortable so I didn't.
I calculated the trajectory and power needed to slap him where he was laying and my performance reliability immediately tanked by ten points because of how much I did not want to do that.
Which was stupid.
I wasn't going to hurt him… Well, I wasn't going to harm him. I knew exactly how much force I could use before it left any damage. It wouldn't even bruise.
I had to try something, and I'd been fucking useless so far…
But looking at him, curled over himself, rubbing his thumb absently over the hem of his shirt, looking at nothing, my performance reliability dropped another three percentage points.
He was my client. My augmented human. No matter how much of an asshole he could be, I didn't want to hurt him. I hadn't ever hurt him. And now… well, he wasn't even being an asshole…
He was just…
I forcibly shut down that line of thinking, and then, before I could second guess myself any more, snapped my hand out.
My palm connected against his skin with a sharp crack, and forced a little surprised huff out of his mouth. His hand shot up to cup his cheek, which was already flushing red, but there wasn't any accusation in his face. Not even really any recognition that it was me that had done it.
Fuck.
I hated myself.
I said his name again.
Nothing.
"Respond," I said, and hated myself just a little bit more. "Tell me what I just did."
"I don't…" he said, and then finally actually met my eyes. There was absolutely nothing behind them. "What?"
"Tell me what I just did," I said again. Calmly. Very, very calmly.
I wanted to punch through the fucking bulkhead, but my tone was calm at least.
Gurathin's hand drifted back to his cheek. The redness had already begun to fade. It didn't make me feel better.
"I didn't… Um…" And I saw the moment that that thought slid away from him. Lost and gone forever.
So that plan didn't work, and there wasn't any way I was going to hit him again. I already wanted to throw myself in an acid bath.
I didn't know what to do. I didn't think that there was anything I could do. The whole thing was fucked.
I was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of apathy.
I didn't want to fuck with Gurathin any more. I didn't want to order him around. I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't want to watch him not understand when he should understand a simple fucking instruction.
I wanted to do my fucking job.
I went and printed a nutritional drink. One of the preset ones, because what the fuck did I know about customised beverage preferences? This one said it was high calorie, and that it had protein and fibre and vitamins.
And it apparently tasted like strawberries, which I'd seen Gurathin eat before.
Great.
I returned to sit at his side.
"Here."
I pressed the drink into his hand, and upped my body temperature, because that's what I always did with sick or injured humans, and I guessed Gurathin fit that category.
(There was a moment where I was worried that he wouldn't know what to do with the drink, and if that happened I was going to have to turn around and go and shoot up the facility a bit more… Maybe blow it up. That would be satisfying).
But he did drink it. Quickly enough that I wondered if he hadn't eaten in a while, or if I'd fucked up and left him without hydration for too long.
When he'd finished, I took the cup from him and resisted the urge to just throw it at the far wall. (Which I did, because I have excellent self-control no matter what ART says).
He was leaning into the side of the bench where it pressed up to the inside of the bulkhead. With his feet still on the floor, his torso was contorted weirdly, bent over to the side. It looked like all of his internal organs must be smushed together, and it made something inside my organics feel icky and wrong.
I leaned over and scooped up his legs into my lap, because… I don't know why. Because it looked uncomfortable? Whatever. I shuffled him down a little, carefully. It was awkward, with the position - I had to kind of try and scoop my hands beneath his waist and his head - but it wasn't like he was heavy for me.
He didn't fight it, or say anything, or even move much. Just let me reposition him so that all his joints at least seemed like they were aligned normally and not twisted up underneath him. So that he was laid on his side against the bench, his legs still curled in my lap, for reasons I didn't want to think about.
Great. Client secure. Resting. Warm. Fed and hydrated.
Good job, Murderbot.
I played Sanctuary Moon to myself so that I could breathe in the crystal air. (I replayed the scene four times).
Gurathin wasn't asleep, or unconscious (I hoped), but his eyes were half closed and vacant.
"Do you remember Dr Mensah?" I asked, because I guess I was a fucking masochist.
It looked like it was a physical effort for him to drag himself back. He blinked, and his jaw worked like he was trying to remember how talking worked.
"Mmm…" he said. "Yeah."
I upped my body temperature a bit more. "We're going to her," I said. "I'm taking you to her. ETA twenty nine hours."
"Ayda," he said, thickly.
"Yes."
If I had a stomach, I was pretty sure I'd feel sick.
Time for the power of friendship, I guessed. (I had a lot less faith in it than in violence).
I connected the hardwire again (he flinched again) and pressed back into his network. I was met with the same emptiness as before. But I didn't… I needed something. Something to get through the next twenty nine hours. Some little spot of hope that this wasn't all pointless.
That I hadn't been too late.
"We're going to Mensah," I said again. "Mensah will fix it."
I needed to believe that.
I would get him home. ART would fix his brain. And Mensah would fix everything else.
I waited. Waited for that little sharp flicker, and when I felt it, I pushed towards it. Gently. I didn't want to damage him any more, but I needed to find him at least. More than that, I needed to understand what the fuck the Company had done.
"She'll fix it," I said again, and pushed through.
And then I found it, all the mushy organic Gurathin bit of him. It was just as quiet as his augments. A low swoosh of lethargy. A kind of listless apathy that I recognised from when I still had my governor module.
"I'm taking you back to her," I said again.
The little spark flared, almost flooded out by all of that apathy. Then I felt something trigger in his augments and the little spark was swatted out before it could connect to anything. Before it could catch onto any neurons, and transform itself into any kind of higher thought.
But it was there.
I withdrew, back into the augments, back into the bit of his head that he'd given me permission to be in. (What a fucking joke).
Gurathin was drifting again. Unfocused. It seemed like he'd forgotten to close his mouth, or he'd checked out again before he could. There was a little pool of fluid on the flight bench beneath his cheek, which was gross, but not nearly as bad as I'd have thought it would be.
I opened the diagnostic report again, and the levels of sedative in his blood had increased (fucking how?) so whatever, I guess.
I pulled my jacket off, careful not to push his feet off my legs as I did, and then folded it and slid it beneath him, raising his head in the way my medical module suggested so that he wouldn't choke, at least.
My fingers tangled and caught in his hair as I did, and I saw his right hand twitch as I pulled free.
I hadn't really thought about it before I'd slipped my hand into his, the same way Mensah had before. Normally, I'd hate it, but I guess this fell into the rescuing clients bit of my programming because my performance reliability rallied by a couple of percentage points.
And I guessed that Gurathin didn't know either way, or that perhaps he thought that I was Mensah, because his fingers twitched and tightened against mine.
And he squeezed back. Hard.
Notes:
I really hope you liked this! I wrote it in a kind of fugue state and then had to edit it XD
I would really love to know what you think, I was trying very hard to make sure it was in character despite the extreme circumstances, but I'm not certain I really got there XD
<3<3<3
Chapter Text
It was too much to ask that the trip back was easy and uneventful. Honestly, when had I ever been that lucky?
I was five episodes in to my Sanctuary Moon dissociation binge when my medical module (and, in sympathy, my threat assessment module) started pinging to let me know that something was going wrong with my augmented human.
Gurathin's breathing rate, already sleep-slowed, was dropping.
I sat up. "Gurathin."
No response, which, honestly, tracked. I shook his shoulder, and said his name again (and a couple more times actually).
If it wasn't waking him, then I was pretty sure that at some point while I wasn't paying attention, he'd shifted from 'asleep' to 'unconscious'…
And my medical module pinged again about 'hypoventilation' and 'apnoea' and fuck…
Fuck.
"Gurathin," I said again. I dumped his feet off my lap as gently as I could so that I could stand up and roll him over onto his back.
His head lolled as I did, and my medical module pinged with another emergency warning that I didn't understand, because it was a piece of shit, and I was a piece of shit, and I didn't know shit about humans except there was a kind of wet wheeze on the end of each of his breaths and that was bad that had to be bad…
The transport must have sensed my panic because it sent me a ping and a query as to whether it should divert us somewhere.
And I didn't know.
I barely knew where we were. I didn't have a fucking clue where was safe. Other than Preservation.
Without thinking about it, I sent it the overview from my medical module. Help me, I sent.
I didn't care that it was a fucking transport. I needed someone to tell me what to do.
In a couple of milliseconds it responded with its on-board emergency protocol, along with the location of its medkits.
It had helpfully highlighted the automated respiratory support units that were part of its standard inventory.
I was already moving while I was reading. I dragged the medkit out from its compartment, and started pulling out everything that I could recognise.
Thank fuck that Transport's guide was written for humans with no training.
My medical module alerted.
Respiratory distress: Immediate intervention required.
Fuck. Fuck.
I scooped everything up and dumped it on the bench at Gurathin's feet. I think if I was a human, my hands would have been shaking.
He was making a crackly sound in the back of his throat, chest shuddering with each breath, and when I scanned over his face, I realised that his lips were starting to go dark and blue-ish.
I fumbled with the respiratory support unit, trying to get the pieces of it together. He gave a kind of cough-gasp that I didn't have a word for.
Painful-sounding and rattly.
His chest went still.
My medical module sounded a shrill alert inside my head, because a not breathing human was a dead human and oh fuck…
I slipped the mask over his face, catching his hair in my fingers and yanking at the straps because I wasn't built for this. I wasn't built to be gentle. I was built to hurt. I wished that anyone else was here. With me.
Instead of me.
But they weren't, it was just me and Gurathin… who wasn't fucking breathing.
I felt the unit engage as soon as it detected that the mask was correctly positioned. It beeped a couple of times and started pushing oxygen with a firm whoosh-click. Hard enough that I could see his ribs move in time.
I watched, while my own system started coming down from all the panicky alarms, and my performance reliability plateaued from where it had started to tank, as his eyelids fluttered and his fingers grasped weakly at nothing, and his skin warmed back up from the sickly blue-white.
This whole thing had freaked the shit out of me, ok? I wasn't at my best. Which is, I'm assuming, why it took me so long to figure out the obvious…
If the levels of the various drugs in his system had kept climbing (which they had), that could only mean one thing:
A) There must be a reservoir of drugs somewhere that was still dosing him.
A quick patted search told me it wasn't outside his body anywhere, which meant:
B) It was located inside his augments somewhere.
Which was bad, but not as bad as the fact that if the levels in his bloodstream were high enough to stop him fucking breathing, then:
C) The reservoir of drugs apparently wasn't able to function independently and, in the absence of a handler or a MedSystem, it was apparently going absolutely batshit and just dumping everything it had into his body.
I did not have a fucking clue how to solve any of those three things.
My medical module pinged again, telling me just how much we definitely, absolutely could not wait for the twenty three (plus?) hours it was still going to take to get to a MedSystem.
Looking at him, I believed it. The fragile skin beneath his eyes was ringed dark, and although his lips weren't blue anymore, he was still a kind of sickly greyish pale.
Again, I didn't know much about human health, but I could assume that was very, very bad…
The little respirator unit was still doing its job. I wasn't sure how long its internal battery was supposed to last, but I had figured out that I could run it off my power banks if I needed to.
Still, the little unit wouldn't do shit if his own augments kept overdosing him with sedatives and tranquillisers.
"Gurathin," I said his name. Again.
Again he didn't answer.
Talking to him was like poking a bruise at this point, but I just couldn't stop.
I grabbed the hardwire and plugged in (no flinch this time), in the time since I'd disconnected, it seemed like his systems had gone into crisis mode.
The augments — the bit that felt familiar and that my own system recognised as Gurathin — seemed to also recognise me as a familiar system because it granted me access automatically.
I wasn't sure how I felt about that.
What I did now realise was that there was an insidious bit of malware (the same bit that kept snuffing out his higher thought patterns, I assumed) that was stalking around his augments, effectively blocking Gurathin's native programming from running.
Which answered a question, I guessed…
The augments weren't compromised... If the sharp little thing I felt before was anything to go by, Gurathin's brain wasn't compromised either (for a given value of compromised which I didn't want to consider too closely), but there was a fuck off powerful piece of malware sitting in between the digital system and Gurathin's squishy brain and snuffing out everything that made him more than an empty husk.
Great.
The augments had been attempting to force an increasingly frantic safe mode reboot for the past thirty minutes, presumably in response to the oncoming medical emergency they were sensing in their human.
(Honestly, the more familiar I got with Gurathin's augments, the more the categories of what constituted Gurathin vs augmentations got muddled up. I did not have the capacity to figure that shit out now).
I sent the augments a status query which I felt get immediately nixed by the malware. Swatted out of existence the same way that it was swatting Gurathin out of existence.
Well, fuck you too.
I sat back on the bench, and before I'd meant to, I'd pulled Gurathin's legs back into my lap. Whatever, I was stressed. I wasn't sure why I was doing anything at the moment.
I spent a couple of minutes reviewing the logs that the augments had given me access to. I didn't really know shit about what augments Gurathin actually had, except that they were apparently more extensive than I thought, but I could see pretty instantly that there were some automated medical systems in there.
The malware apparently hadn't targeted those — (and the drug reservoir was not part of them. Of course. How could it ever be that easy?) — which made sense because the Company apparently hadn't wanted to kill him.
(Great job, there).
It was the medical augments that were, understandably, freaking out about the current situation.
Huh…
I thought about it.
I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. I didn't know how the dispensing system worked and with the malware patrolling around, I wasn't going to be able to poke around until I figured it out… But the medical augments apparently did know…
I decided to do what I did best — fuck around until I either broke something or something useful happened.
I started poking at the malware, making like I was trying to disable it, or trying to make contact with Gurathin's organic brain again.
I immediately felt all of its attention turning on me, searching for me so that it could boot me out of the system altogether. I poked at it a little more and then focussed on hunkering down and throwing up firewalls, digging metaphorical fingernails into the inside of Gurathin's head, give Gurathin's medical augments enough time to…
Ah… I felt the malware find me. It hit me like a physical punch. I slipped, and dug my fingers in again.
Gurathin flinched. Face screwing up briefly like whatever it had done had hurt, which definitely wasn't what I'd intended. His eyes were half open, but unfocused in a way that made me think he still wasn't really conscious. The respirator unit was still pushing a steady pulse of air into his lungs.
The malware breached itself up against my firewall again. I could feel the medical augments creeping carefully around behind it. Hopefully, I could keep the malware's attention on me for long enough for them to do their job and stabilise their human. The malware coding hit me again, slipping in around the edges of my firewall and peeling me out of Gurathin's systems.
I poked at it again, just to provoke it a little more, and then, a few things happened all at once, fast enough that I had to review my logs to figure out exactly what order they happened in.
Firstly, the malware tried to pass a copy of itself through our connection. My internal security flagged it as a hostile worm and immediately severed the connection between us.
Then Gurathin made a kind of gasping noise, and tried to roll himself off the bench, which would have sent the little respirator unit smashing to the floor, and generally put us back into medical emergency territory again, so I instinctively grabbed at his shoulders and physically wrestled him back onto the bench.
That wasn't difficult, if I was honest. Gurathin wasn't exactly built like an athlete at the best of times, and I was designed to be a killing machine.
What I had missed the first time — while I was distracted in the middle of frantically checking my systems for any rogue malware, and trying not to accidentally break Gurathin's neck by using too much force to restrain him — was the tail-end of the flickering feeling of triumph from his medical augments as the insidious little dispenser augment got unceremoniously shut down, and then bricked for good measure.
I felt the malware flailing, spinning its attention between me and Gurathin's augments, and I pulled the hardwire out before it could decide to try to push into my systems again.
Gurathin was still struggling, weakly, which honestly, was just making me feel bad. His hand was closed around my wrist, scrabbling to pry my hand away.
"Gurathin," I said, as steadily as I could manage, and let my new favourite buffer phrase take over. "Stay calm. It'll be ok. You have my word."
I… don't think it really worked…
Notes:
Posting a slightly shorter chapter as this seemed like a natural break point :)
I'm also kind of winging this story XD So I would love to know what you think!
Chapter Text
Gurathin kept struggling until he passed out again.
Which made me feel like shit.
I knew he wasn't conscious. I knew that he didn't know it was me. I knew that if I didn't stop him, he would hurt himself, trying to drag himself onto the floor of the transport, away from the thing that his squishy animal brain was telling him was hurting him.
None of that made me stop feeling like the villain in one of my shows.
The thing that was hurting him was inside his brain, and I couldn't do shit about it, except hold him down, and let it.
The malware had flagged me as hostile now, even if it hadn't before. It had tried to copy itself into my system, reconnecting seemed like a spectacularly bad idea given I didn't have any kind of plan of how to get it out of my augmented human.
I was just as useless as I had been before.
After he did finally pass out again, still, and with his breathing artificially steady, my medical module gave me periodic updates as he metabolised the sedatives.
It predicted that they'd be at negligible levels in his bloodstream by the time we were about fourteen hours from Preservation space.
So that was good, I guess…
It wasn't good.
When Gurathin did wake, it was after several seconds of weird flinching and twitching, which gave me enough time to pause my show, and run through sixteen different catastrophic scenarios.
What I didn't expect was for him to blink awake and then look right at me. In my defence, the last few times he'd woken up, he'd mainly been flailing and incoherent, so it's not like my hopes were high.
Now his expression pulled into a scowl, and I saw him glance around the transport interior.
It was, honestly, the most alert I'd seen him since I found him in the cell.
He focused back on me, tried to say something and then noticed the respirator mask still keeping his breathing steady. He reached up a shaky hand and tugged it away.
I tensed, ready to force it back on to his face in case he was being stupid and human about it, but he didn't start gasping, just said, with a slight rasp, "Where are we?"
"Do you know who I am?" I asked, because I didn't actually know where we were, and frankly, that wasn't the most important question right now.
He gave me a look.
"Yes," he said, and then didn't fucking answer my question either. "I assume that means I didn't."
"No, it doesn't. "
There wasn't any time that he hadn't actually remembered who I was. That was about the only positive of this situation so far. If he'd started screaming 'rogue SecUnit!' every time he looked at me, things would have gone considerably less well…
There would probably have been a lot more choked out augmented humans for one… well, one more anyway…
Gurathin was just looking at me now like I was the one being weird.
He pushed himself up, and swung his legs off mine. Then he winced, screwing his eyes up, doubled over with his hand fisted into the side of his hair like he was in pain.
"Are you ok?" I asked, stupidly, and he waved me away.
Rude.
He forced himself up, breathing hard and casting around the little transport again. "Where are we?" he asked again.
Which, yes, fine…
"On a transport," I said, trying to keep my tone calm.
This… wasn't what I expected, which, honestly? My statistical modelling system was a piece of shit, so I should have expected what I didn’t expect… or something…
"Friendly." I carried on. "Destination Preservation Station, ETA thirteen hours."
Gurathin nodded, still kneading at the side of his head. "I'm not…" he started slowly.
He flinched again and didn't finish.
"Status?" I asked, since he hadn't answered before.
"Headache," he answered tightly. "Did I… Was I hurt?"
I didn't know how to answer that question. Yes and no, I guess. Or, yes, but not in the way he was thinking.
"There's something… wrong," he said, after a second. "There's something wrong with me."
"With your augments," I said, but before I'd even finished speaking, he was swearing and clutching at his head again.
He stumbled slightly to the left, and I was up and grabbing at his arm before he could begin to fall and give himself a concussion on top of everything else.
Panic shot through me again. He'd already nearly died (something dark in my processor told me that not breathing was the fucking definition of being dead, but he didn't. He didn't), if this was one of my shows, this was exactly the point where the narrative would bluff. The injured character would wake up and it would seem like all danger had passed, and then something shocking and catastrophic would happen…
Gurathin didn't fall down, but he did keep his eyes scrunched up for long enough that I worried he was going to pass out or stop breathing again. But he didn't and when he looked at me again, he gave a long slow scan from my hand grasping at his arm up to my face.
"Thought you didn't like touching," he ground out.
I dropped him. "Fuck you."
His face did something complicated as he glanced around the transport's little crew space again, as though he was actually looking at it properly this time. He wandered over to the control panel, which a human pilot could use to take control if they needed to.
"Where even are we?" he asked, peering down at the guidance display.
"I don't know exactly," I said.
That was Transport's job. I had other shit to deal with.
Gurathin just looked at me with alarm, which made a dark little thought enter my processor.
"Do you know our destination?" I asked.
I got a sharp look back.
"That's what I just asked you."
"Preservation Station," I said, a little desperately.
He frowned again. "Then why didn't you say so."
Oh… shit…
He winced again, stumbled again. This time I was too caught up in the everything that was happening and just let him collapse hard onto one of the benches at the other side of the space.
His teeth were gritted as he ground the heel of his palm into his eye. "I'm not… right… I can't think. I can't…"
He threw himself up again, staggered over to the control display again. "What is this? Where the fuck are we going?"
He glanced across at me. My medical module was telling me that his breathing rate was becoming extremely elevated, which I could see without the warning.
"SecUnit," Gurathin said, and his tone sounded like he didn't know whether to blame me or beg me.
I hated both options.
"SecUnit," he said again, "I don't… Where's Ayda? Why are we here? What are we… What's wrong with me?"
That all came out in a single breath, one that had him gasping to refill his lungs. One big breath didn't seem to do it though, he dragged in another, and another.
I recognised it easily enough. Seemed like this was enough to make anyone panic.
"Gurathin," I said, I'd lost count of how many times. "You were captured by a corporate entity." His face went white. It didn't slow his breathing rate. I was fucking this up. "You were-" I didn't know if there was a word, "-made compliant."
That was… the wrong thing to say…
My medical module pinged that his heart was racing, and his face contorted into something like horror.
He said something in that language I never bothered to look up, and then doubled over, retching and rasping like his body was trying to expel everything inside it.
I had stepped forward automatically but I didn't know what the fuck I was supposed to do about this medical-emotional breakdown. I should maybe touch him? But I didn't want to, and I would hate it if someone touched me while I was… like this.
Gurathin was saying something, but he was shaking and breathing so hard that I had to replay my audio recording to figure out what it was.
"Non-standard retirement," was one of the first things he'd said, and which sure as shit sounded like the kind of euphemism the Company liked to use.
He'd said a few other things, rambling and not quite coherent. Lots of swearing. Confirmation that he'd seen the same kind of drugged augmented humans I had.
My hand was kind of hovering in the air near him, and after a second, he made a grab for it. Under the circumstances, I could forgive it… even though I hated the way his clammy, sticky hand was gripping mine.
His face was very close to mine now, as we were both kneeling against the transport floor.
"They… They burned bits out of me," Gurathin said, shuddering like he was freezing to death in the relatively pleasant environmentally controlled transport.
"No," I said, but he was already shaking his head, grabbing out at my other arm.
"They… cut… away… They… cut out bits…"
"Gurathin," I said. "You are not inhaling enough oxygen."
He shook me. "Listen! Listen-"
"I am," I said, but he was already cringing away, eyes screwed up in pain, as the malware stole another bit of him away.
He blinked and looked at me again. Frown still there like it wouldn't ever, ever leave now.
"SecUnit," he said slowly.
I could see him trying to make sense of it. The pain in his head, the ache in throat from retching, the stress hormones flooding his system, all of it still there… but he didn't know why…
"I'm trying to help," I said, because it was true, and everything else I'd tried so far had been a spectacular failure.
Good job, Murderbot.
"There's… something wrong," Gurathin said again. "With me… with my mind."
"I know," I said, he still hadn't let go of my hand with his gross sweaty fingers. I squeezed back. "And I'm trying to help."
Notes:
Mini update, because it didn't fit nicely with the next chapter <3<3<3