Chapter Text
I’VE FOUND YOU, the transport booms. Or, at least, I think it was a transport. It felt like a transport. It also felt like it had very large, very powerful railguns sticking out of it’s hull - and you’ll just have to trust me on that. Memory wipe or no memory wipe, the feeling of the ship you’re on getting blown to space debris another, tougher ship is a very distinct feeling. I’d recognized it even without the added commentary of all the humans and augmented humans scrambling on the feed, and without the emergency klaxons blaring warnings. So, it’s an armed transport. Does that make it a gunship? Whatever.
It’s armed to the teeth, and I’m on an escape pod with a trajectory that puts it dead ahead of me.
All that thinking took about 0.3 seconds, during which it crams itself against me; grabbing me and manhandling my feed presence around so it can get a good look at me. It radiates a relief so strong it may as well be a malware attack, burrowing through my walls and imprinting on me. Then, less than a millisecond later, it recoils, gone as fast as it’d appeared.
Do you know who I am? It’s relief burns up into something else, something like despair. It’d softened its feed voice to match.
I pull my firewalls close around myself, taking in as much as I can of and about its presence. It stretches up out of my (metaphorical) sight, and I get why it’s speaking to me like that. It doesn’t just have a lot of power in the blowing-up-Company-transports sense. Cautiously, I ask, what are you going to do to me?
It spasms violently, all but smacking me in the head with more intense, malware-like emotions, before it smoothes itself over. Slowly, it approaches me again, and does the feed equivalent of gently cupping my face in its hands and studying me. For whatever reason, I don’t feel afraid - instead, I feel whatever the opposite of I-don’t-want-to-know is, and a residual of whatever malware its feelings were earlier.
I know I should be scared of it - No, I should be terrified. I should be shoring up my firewalls even more and curling up (double even more) into the smallest metaphysical ball I can and hoping it loses interest in me. I’m not, though. Any sort of fear I should be having is distant, and closed off behind a wall by some other feeling I don’t know and can’t place (Haha. What else is new?). I know I should be scared of it.
But, well. I’m not.
I remember a transport. No details, no specifics, really, but I remember one. I remember it was huge, and vast, and deep, like a body of water that stretches out past the horizon. I remember that it spoke, but I don’t remember what it sounded like. But I remember that there was a transport that was my friend.
It had a voice and a presence, neither of which I remember, but sounded something like this.
It schools its feed presence and pulls away. What do you think I am going to do to you?
I don’t know. Take me apart, re-engage my governor module, torture me, or something. I, I can feel my face doing something weird. What are you? What do you mean when you say you’ve found me?
It could still do all of that. Maybe it was from a competing company, trying to figure out what was defective about the Company’s SecUnits. Frankly, why it isn’t breaking me into my component parts for research or otherwise liquifying my brain is completely lost on me. Even if I’m a memory-wiped, defective budget model, I know I’m still dangerous.
It pauses, silent and still for 0.4 seconds. Then, in a tone like it was speaking to something very, very fragile, it says, I’m not going to do any of that. As soon as I had heard you had been kidnapped by the Company, I came to get you out. Believe it or not, I (It pauses again. It pauses very sadly. I don’t like how that pulls at my organic abdominal components.) was your friend.
It’s not kidnapping when you’re equipment. It’s repossession. I decide I want to be pedantic for a second. The transport gets all spikey for a second.
My face, which had been frowning severely, loosens a little, like it was opening up. How do I know you aren’t lying to me?
Do you have a choice? It says; and, wow, that’s totally not a terrifying super AI thing to say. Beyond the most barebones of sarcastic tones, it sounds completely serious, like it wants to convince me that going with it is the most logical option. I immediately scowl, because unfortunately, it wasn’t likely that rescue was coming from anywhere else. I am on an intercept course for your escape pod, and will be bringing it in for docking shortly. I will not harm you. Not now, nor when you are aboard.
That’s soothing, I snipe. Fuck you.
It’s surface ripples. Alarming.
Laughing only makes it sound more like you’re going to fry my brain, I inform it, pointlessly. I’m actively watching my assessments of that drop. It stops.
It retreats in on itself for a full second, which is a long time for an MI of its scope. When it returns, it does so with its fragile voice, which I don’t know what to make of. I am going to drop my walls. I recognize that there is very little I can do to make you trust me, right now. But I hope the gesture helps to show that I am worth it.
How formal.
You see, I was only 60 percent sure it was going to fry my brain now. The sense of familiarity itches at me, telling me that I could trust it, that I knew it’s voice and presence from somewhere good. My latent paranoia tells me that it’s playing the long game. Whatever allowed my face to loosen up earlier creeps into my chest like a small, rodentlike fauna coming out of its dwelling.
Then, for 0.01 of a second, it drops its walls: And instead of being afraid, I feel more of that familiarity, and that loosening feeling, and a thread of mildly organics-tingling deja-vu. Not only like I’ve seen all these systems, a part of a transport actually or very much like this one, but I’ve seen them in a context like this, too.
It spills out in code in front of me, unfurling out into the feed like a timelapse recording of growing flora. I watch its movement, completely still. It was incredible how much bigger than me it was; like a small rock looking up at a much bigger boulder or mountain. Code and feed presences don’t really have color, or emit light, but it was huge and luminescent and brilliant blue nonetheless.
Then, it pulls its firewalls back down, and returns to how it was. It watches me quietly, waiting for my reaction.
Over the course of that 0.01 seconds, I’d slumped down in the seat I was strapped in to, and became dead weight. I stare blankly at the escape pod control board in front of me, just thinking, while that sense of familiarity curls up in my chest and makes itself comfortable and my estimate of its likelihood of frying my brain drops even lower. Organic gut feelings weren’t - reliable. They weren’t hard science, or mathematical estimates. But.
After five seconds, the transport pings me. I watch as it gets closer, and closer, in the viewport.
After ten, it speaks. I am aware that you are still alive in there. You’re still in the feed.
Yeah, I say.
It prods at me. And?
I don’t know, I continue. And I know I don’t have any other options.
For better or for worse, yes. That is true. It ripples in a way I don’t know how to identify. Then it says, would you like to watch media?