Work Text:
come out . . .
It's been a while now
Ayda Mensah wished polite goodbyes to the meeting’s participants as they left the room. Then she opened the other door of conference room and went out onto the balcony, where SecUnit had been waiting to give the illusion of privacy. Privacy was always an illusion when SecUnit was around. It could not help its nature as surveillance technology any more than she could help her nature as a social mammal. The difference between her and her collages was that she trusted it not to use the information it collected to harm them.
She joined it at the railing, looking out over Preservation Station. Directly below them was one of the station’s parks. A section of real grass and trees, with a reflecting pool in the middle. The pair of swans that circled the pool were not flesh and blood animals. They were complex clockwork that an art student had made and donated to the station. Somewhere below them, someone was playing what might have been a love song on a guitar. She wasn’t paying enough attention to the lyrics to be sure.
I've got so many things I could tell you,
If my stubborn mouth doesn't let me down.
And I can't look at you straight-on
You're made from something different than I know
SecUnit noticed when she joined it at the railing, but didn’t say anything. As usual, it wasn’t sure what to say. There wasn’t any point in asking about the meeting, they both know it heard the whole thing, and saw it through the drone that it kept near her. It did not perceive the world like a human, and it did to want to. It did not want to only see what was in front of its face. It did not want to only perceive things once and then have to rely on faulty organic memory to remember what happened. Hearing everything everyone was doing in a building make it feel safer. Except for bathrooms, it could really do without knowing how often humans go to the bathroom and why they were there, but it could not help hearing. It could only ignore.
It could only pretend it did not hear. Which was why it was standing outside so Dr. Mensah’s colleagues could pretend that it did not hear them also. It wished they understood how little it cared about what they said. How thoroughly it meant them no harm. They can’t get past the fact that it wasn’t human, for all the similarities in appearance. They knew what it was built for. They wanted it to be something other than it was. That wasn’t going to happen.
SecUnit thought about all the things it could tell her. About the people it met on its travels. It wouldn’t even know where to start explaining something like ART, and it was pretty sure that ART’s existence was supposed to be even more of secret than its own. It could tell her about its clients on RaviHyral, or about Miki and Don Abene. She would probably be interested, but that felt unsafe. Would she trust it less if it talked about other people to her? Would that make her think it had talked about her to other people? It had told ART about her, when it had explained why it had run away. It hadn’t told anyone else. Safer to not say anything, to show it could respect privacy to some extent.
I try to slip the marching clock
But centipedes invade my thoughts
Without free will I heel and I go
It was nice to just stand there without saying anything. There was so much talking in her job. The voices of her collages rang in her ears, and she tired to stop replaying the various arguments in her head. There was just so much to do, and so little time in a day. Moments like this, standing quietly, doing nothing, felt like a luxury. She could see why SecUnit liked it. When all of your time was spent doing something for someone else, doing nothing for yourself was very relaxing.
Ayda knew she had been pushing herself too hard lately. It was safer to keep busy, to work until exhaustion took over, than it was to rest and risk bad memories crowding in. To risk seeing again that creature with to many legs lunging up out of the ground. To see her friend in its jagged jaws and not know if this was the last time she would see her, or see her alive. To confront the fact that incident had only been the first in a series of extremely close calls that could have easily ended with all of them dead.
The reason they weren’t dead stood beside her. And that in and of itself was an incredibly unlikely coincidence. That it had been this SecUnit who had been sent with them, against their objections. This one with the hacked governor module, rather than any of the others. Because a governed SecUnit would not have been able to save them. Would not have been able to use quotes from Sanctuary Moon to talk Volescu out of the hole. It hadn’t hacked itself to save them. I hadn’t known they existed when it made that choice, but it wouldn't have been able to save them if it hadn’t.
I step onto that metal plate,
Where it meets the dazzling sound of trains,
And I beg those trains to run.
Through the window opposite, closer in than the bands of stars that make up the galaxy, a cluster of lights was approaching. The transit ring wasn’t visible from this window, but that was the destination of the ship. SecUnit watched it go past. It was the same model of ship as the one that took it to Milu. That was a nice little ship. It hoped it was doing well wherever it was.
It thought about all the transit rings it had passed through since it became free. All the ships. All going about their own business, transporting things between star systems. A nice life, always moving and always being useful, but a lot of your own time to think your own thoughts. It’d always liked ships, it had been enjoyable, getting to know different ones. Even if some of them could be annoying sometimes.
Something about seeing the ships come and go from the station made SecUnit feel safe. They represented escape. It didn't think it would need it, but it was so, so important that the option was there. And it was so, so important that the humans around it would allow it to take the option if it chose too. That was why that was the first thing it tested, if it would be allowed to leave. Because that was the difference between a person and property. A person did not need permission to leave.
Cause I can't look at you straight-on
You're made from something different than I know
Of course once it had saved them, then they had to figure out what to do with each other. Leaving it in the only life it had ever known wasn’t an option. Everyone knew it was going to get killed sooner or later if it stayed. So she had bought it, and yes the thought of buying a person still made her feel wrong, even though there hadn’t been any other choice. And they had tried to bring it here, with promises of safety, as if it had any understanding of what they meant by that.
They were, in some ways very, very different. She remembered how she had felt the first time it told her it didn’t like planets. How strange that had made it seem. Because she did like planets, but she liked them for the same reason it liked stations, and ships.
Preservation was a young enough world, with enough wild lands, that wilderness survival was still taught in school. Every child on Preservation, by the time they had finished their schooling, would know how to find water, shelter, and edible plants. Just like being able to swim in deep water, being able to keep yourself alive for a week if lost in a remote area was considered a necessary life skill all children should have. This meant that on a planet she always had the option to just vanish into the wilderness and have a reasonable chance of surviving. Just like SecUnit valued its ability to vanish on whatever ship was heading the way it wanted to go.
My eyes are on the sidewalk,
It's gum holding your feet
I swear under my breath
Because I'm starving in your gravity
Sometimes it wondered (a lot of times actually) if its life would be easier if it just gave up and chose one thing to be. Would it be so bad to be a pet bot? It didn’t want that, but it didn’t have a clear reason why. What Miki and Don Abene had didn’t really look that bad. Certainly better than what its life had been before.
Or there was the option of pretending to be human. It was too late to do that here now, Dr. Mensah had offered it the option when they first arrived, but it had said no. Passing as an augmented human had worked out ok before though. Sure it was stressful, to hide what you were, but being honest was stressful to. And all the humans seemed to assume that anything human shaped wanted to be human. It didn’t want that, but wouldn't its life be easier if it could want that?
It knew it couldn’t really pick one thing to be. It wasn’t a bot, and it wasn’t a human, and it wasn’t going to lie about being one or the other when it was both. No matter how hard that was for people to accept. It might try, if Dr. Mensah ever asked it to. And part of the reason it trusted her so much was that it knew she would never ask.
You're made from something different than I know . . .
You linger just a little long,
I see your gun is drawn with the safety on
She considered that desire, and ability, to vanish as good evidence that it had separated itself from the purpose for which it was created. It hadn’t been built to ride around on ships and watch media, but it chose to. It had been built to obey orders, to spy, and to kill on command, and it generally chose not to. That was something she had realized when it had run away, how much it wanted a choice.
She thought about her conversation with Don Abene. The woman had told her how it had save their party, and done so without killing the GrayCris agent, at her request. That had been an interesting choice on SecUnit’s part. It could have killed them without asking, but it had given Don Abene the chance to tell it no, and then abided by that. It wanted more choices than just killing, even if it wasn’t always sure how to ask for them.
You can walk me back to my hotel
Like it was home.
It’s humans had shown it that they respected it for what it was. That was why it had stayed this time. It’s hotel room, with the small network of cameras. That was not something a human would want, or need, but they had made it for SecUnit. It was what a secunit needed. That gave it hope, that they at least understood what it was.
At first being given a room had made it feel like a pet. While traveling around once it was free it hadn’t had places that were its own. Only places it passed through. Before that, when it belonged to the company, it had been part of the equipment. It had owned noting, not even itself.
It didn’t really own the room of course. The room belonged to the hotel, but it was set aside for it, for as long as it wanted it, and that was pretty much the same thing. Having someplace to call home made it feel like a human. That had always been a human thing, being able to go home when a job was over. It was strange to consider that as a possibility for it now too. There were a lot of possibilities now that it hadn’t considered before.
And I smell those fools you made cordwood of
In petty dreams that leave me sleeping here, in your arms.
Even knowing that, she still has a secret, selfish desire to let it solve her problems with violence. It was very good at violence. She would never forget the smell of blood in the transit pod on TranRollinHyfa. Having grown up on a farm and being the mother of multiple children, she was very familiar with blood, but that situation had been different. That hadn’t been accidental injuries, those had been intentional inflicted on people who had laughed to her face about how they would kill her if she stopped being valuable as a hostage. Those people had been hurt or killed to save her life. She knew they weren’t the last people who SecUnit would hurt on her behalf. There was a temptation to ask it directly to do so, rather than just relying on its judgment. That temptation disgusted her, she didn’t want to be the sort of person who would even think about that, but here she was.
The other selfish desire that she would never speak of, was to be hugged again. She would treasure that memory forever. That it recognized what she needed, and offered despite its own discomfort. That was when she began to feel confident that she would survive. That SecUnit actually would be able to save her life, and get her home. That she would see her children again, and her planet. And she did. It saved her, and she saved it, and they protected each other, and that was why they were able to stand on this balcony while someone played a guitar and clockwork swans swam circles on the pond below.
City swans,
Our crook'd necks long
City swans
And I can't look at you straight-on
You're made from something different than I know
SecUnit looked down at the circling swans in the pond below. It approved of the choice. It had looked up how much damage a real swan could do to a human, and was glad they had not tried to keep those on the station. It was a bit strange looking at something mechanical with no mind at all. At first it had tired pinging them, and they had seemed like some sort of ghost. It was used to them now, and had actually begun to enjoy their regular, graceful movements.
The swans swam around the pond in opposite directions. When they met, they would slow, bow to each other, circle each other, and then continue on their programmed path. Each circuit of the pond they would meet, bow and circle twice, nearly touching, but not quite. They were a matched set in shape. In color, one was black, and one was white.
Watching them SecUnit thought about Dr. Mensah, standing close enough to touch, but not. They went their separate ways sometimes, but then returned to each other's orbit. Circling, almost close enough to touch, then off again to their own things before returning. Just like the clockwork swans. It was good. A small smile turned up the corner of SecUnit’s mouth, as it stood beside its favorite human, and they didn’t talk, or look at each other.
And it breaks my heart just like the day,
That I looked down and I realized
I'd been sailing so long I'd become the shore
Ayda had been on enough missions out of Preservation system, to have come home many times. There was something about returning to a place of safety. It changed the way people moved, the way they talked. There was a characteristic easing of tension.
She noticed that with SecUnit when it was around her. It was more at ease. Someone who hadn’t spent so much time watching it sidelong, so as not to annoy it by staring, might not have noticed, but Ayda did. And the obvious conclusion was that she was its place of safety. That was a big responsibility. To be the closest thing another person had to a home. That was why she would never ask it for the things she wanted. Why she would always respect its boundaries. Because it had so little safety in its life. She would never forgive herself if she did something that threatened the peace it had found with her.
Maybe what they were would never have a name, never make sense to anyone on the outside. That didn’t really matter. What mattered was that they were safe, alive, and trusted each other. They didn’t need a name for it.
City swans,
Our crook'd necks long
City swans
