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Ayda hadn't moved much since they took off. She hadn't spoken at all.
She had it in her lap. What was left of it. A lot of its torso and its head. It wasn't bleeding much anymore. Various automatic cutoffs had evidently worked. Ayda's clothes were stained an alarming medley of red and blue and silver, and the smell of the mixture had burned itself into her brain—was triggering other flashes of times she'd seen it hurt. Times it had gotten hurt for her.
This time, she couldn't feel the very faint vibration of its pumps. Any of them. It was completely still.
Ayda's team wasn't speaking much either. Ratthi and Bharadwaj had put themselves on either side of her. Arada, Pin-Lee, and Gurathin had taken the seats in front, with Arada occasionally glancing back to see if she was all right, never letting go of Pin-Lee's hand. Pin-Lee had a display in their lap and was paging through it, occasionally looking up at the corporates in the facing seats as if to make a note, and sometimes making a brief scribble with a stylus. Gurathin had settled into the hostile slouch and steady glare that Ayda had come to think of as his snapping turtle look. She knew from experience that he was willing to keep glaring at Corporates for as long as it took. She also knew that it didn't tend to rattle trained salespeople. These Corporates, however, seemed intimidated, either by Gurathin's hostile attention or Pin-Lee's legal note-taking.
Or perhaps just confused by the fact that Ayda was cradling the body of a dead SecUnit.
It wasn't fair.
It was not fucking fair.
How many good things had it had in its life, anyway? Too few. She could count—she remembered and treasured—the times that she had surrepititiously noticed a trace of a smile on its face. And yet, the sheer grumpy kindness. The picture that her youngest had drawn for it was in its room at the station. Typical kid artwork, with Ayda herself identified by a puff of hair, Farai larger and rounder, Tano at the far edge, and SecUnit—drawn taller than everyone else simply by making a much longer line for the torso—at the other side, mouth curved down and hair sketched in like pointy straw. It's the ugliest picture I've ever seen, SecUnit had told Ayda once.
I can take it back and put it—
And then it was, abruptly, between her and the wall, one of those motions that invariably made every human jump. No. I want it right there. With "right there," being between the enormous Sanctuary Moon poster and a poster for something called Worldhoppers.
The grumbling, she had thought at the time, was a sort of armor. It held all these loves inside itself, and it had learned all its life that nothing like that was safe, so—put armor on it. Rough spiky words. So that nothing could pry out what it cherished.
She had wanted to give it a lifetime, ten lifetimes, of things to cherish and enjoy and, all right, obsess on, the way it did with its media. And it had been destroyed in a senseless fight trying to rescue ungrateful corporates from outright murderous corporates, and the people it had rescued with its last breath cared nothing about it. Didn't appreciate the honor, the incredible soul that it had.
It was not fair.
The shuttle—it was the Corporates' shuttle, not one belonging to Preservation—matched its airlock with the transit station, and Ayda heard the clunk. They were going to have to check in here and wait for Perihelion, and—she knew already—they wouldn't even be able to get SecUnit's remains onto the station unless they put it in something.
It wasn't fair.
Ratthi helped her stand up. She didn't let go of it. It was light, now, far too light. She remembered how heavy it had seemed the first time she thought it had died—not that much more than a human the same size, she'd learned later, but they had never tried to drag a human of that size either.
Something about laying it down in the box made the tears start, and then they didn't stop. Ratthi put his arm around her. I couldn't save it, I couldn't save it, I couldn't save it— And now she had to put it down in a box, a cold, hard box like it was a thing—did it know, had it ever really believed, how incredible a person it had been? Or had it still assumed that it was meant to be used up and left behind?
She let it down and straightened up. Hands coated in red, silver, blue. Weeping. She wiped her tears with her sleeve, then wiped her eyes again, hastily, as one of the liquids stung. Not that she was going to stop crying any time soon, so the liquids would be washed away…
And heard, through her feed device, —Kvxffsch!!—
A burst of static. Her log just listed it as Error. But it also listed it as coming from SecUnit.
"It's still here!" It burst out of her in a shout, startling everyone. Bharadwaj started to put her hand consolingly on her shoulder, to say something soothing, perhaps, and jolt her out of her delusion. Ayda shook it off. "Yes, I'm sure, there was a feed message."
"What did it say?" Ratthi asked.
"Ayda—we know that sometimes it—says things—"
Bharadwaj was thinking of the buffer phrase, Ayda realized. Six days in the GrayCris hab, sleeping in dead people's beds and taking turns monitoring the cubicle, listening to SecUnit's automatic voice recording telling them to return its body so the company could kill it. They had all taken shifts in the space so that SecUnit wouldn't be alone. Bharadwaj had been the hero of those six days, providing medical support for both SecUnit and Gurathin, who had (perhaps predictably) overextended himself massively and made his knee worse. Arada couldn't take much of SecUnit's horrifying repetition before bursting into tears, so Ayda had assigned her to getting Gurathin food and pills and making sure that for once, he stayed down as long as MedSys said that he should. She had relied on Bharadwaj and Ratthi—Bharadwaj for her expertise, and Ratthi for the sheer relief of having his friendship at her back. But it meant that Bharadwaj had spent almost as much time in that cubicle as she had… "It says things when it's not conscious, but it's still alive."
—Ftxxxfpkkh!— Another burst of static.
Something about it struck Ayda as urgent. She bent over it. "What is it? What do you need?"
Pin-Lee was having some sort of intense conversation with the Corporates, but Ayda couldn't worry about that right now. "We scanned it," Bharadwaj said gently. "There were no life signs."
"It's in there." She knew it. Knew it in her bones.
But she had known in her bones just a moment ago that it was dead, hadn't she.
What if this was just the delusion of someone who couldn't accept? What if she was hearing the random static of a system collapsing, or one that had already collapsed, and her own guilt—her own failure, in not stopping it from risking itself, not telling it enough that it mattered—
Ratthi had left her side. Ayda turned around, just in time to see him finish saying something low-voiced and urgent to Gurathin. Gurathin nodded firmly and his eyes rolled back. Looking at something in the feed. And Ratthi turned and came back to Ayda.
Ayda was about to say something indignant, like, did you ask him to check if I was hallucinating? but Ratthi preempted her by saying, "Pick it up."
"What?"
"It probably can't hear anything and it can't see, so—I know it probably hates it, but touch is the only way for it to know anyone is here." He looked past her to Bharadwaj, and added, "And it might be nothing, but we have to try."
Bharadwaj hesitated, then said, "You're right. I'm sorry. Let me help." She reached into the box and put her hand behind SecUnit's head, stopping it from flopping as Ayda leaded it up again. Some reservoir of blue fluid, which hadn't been sealed or already leaked out, dripped on the floor as Ayda took the body back.
There really was no sign of life from it. Maybe she was wrong.
Pin-Lee's voice was raised now. "—saved your sorry asses and according to your laws, we could charge you for every wound, every resource we used, and every fucker we pulled out of your miserable mud pit, so—" Arada was standing beside and a step behind them, nodding loyally at every point that Pin-Lee ticked off. The Corporates stopped listening to them suddenly, though, as everyone heard the airlock seal, lock, and detach.
"What the fuck are you playing at?" That was the lead Corporate, who had given his name as Site Manager Kintan.
The answer didn't come from Pin-Lee, but from the bot's speakers. And not in the bot's voice, either. "You have been diverted. Do not be alarmed."
Well, that explained what Gurathin had been doing in the feed. Calling for help. Gurathin was wary of the Perihelion, to say the least, but he had also established some sort of equilibrium with SecUnit. They'd had several private conversations—Ayda couldn't begin to guess what had been said, or how guarded, prickly people raised in the Corporation Rim approached a simple apology, let alone something as complicated as reconciliation—but the upshot, as far as Ayda could tell, was that when everything was safe, Gurathin and SecUnit traded insults at a level that made strangers fear that they would escalate to open warfare, and in a crisis, they moved together as smoothly as if they had been practicing since childhood. She didn't know entirely what to make of it, but she'd take it. This was a crisis, and Gurathin had done exactly what SecUnit would want. He had sent a distress signal to the Perihelion.
"We agreed we would be returned to the station! We had a deal!" Under the belligerence, Ayda could hear real fear in Kintan's voice, and that was dangerous. People did things when they were scared.
She stepped forward, pitching her voice for an announcement. "We are making an emergency detour to assist a teammate. You will be brought back to the station as soon as possible."
"That piece of scrap is not a teammate, and—I am talking!" The last part was a response to Ratthi, Arada, and Pin-Lee all reprimanding him at once, with Ratthi almost yelling, It is a person! while Arada said, If you can't recognize a person who died for you— and Pin-Lee just told them where their opinion could go, what level of force they should use to put it there, and how many sharp corners ought to be involved.
The words died for you rattled around in Ayda's head and she tried not to let them break her confidence. "Kintan, my team intends to deliver you safely—"
"That's Site Manager Kintan—"
"Very well, you may address me as Madame President Doctor Mensah." Okay, that felt good, but it probably wasn't the best solution to this problem. "Site Manager Kintan, you have certain rights in this situation, and we will make sure that they are respected."
"They do indeed have rights," the Perihelion cut in, smoothly, and once again Ayda was certain that it had copied those intonations directly from the predatory cybernetic planet in Zero Sagitarius: Cold Star Rising. "And with a little bit of cooperation, they will never have to test who wins in a contest between rights and power."
Did Perihelion really not know other ways to solve a problem, Ayda wondered. Surely, surely someone had given it diplomacy modules. Surely SecUnit had shared some of its techniques for resolving situations—then again, SecUnit seemed to find Perihelion's menacing behavior somewhat endearing, and looked very nearly amused when it neatly slid into the Good Enemy role opposite to Perihelion's Bad Enemy.
And she was thinking of it as alive now, which it was, please let it be alive, but what if it wasn't? What if the feed static had been the last gasp of a dying computer system, and meant nothing?
Kintan said, "Who the fuck are you?" a little unsteadily.
"No-one that you wish to engage with. Ever."
The feed static burst hadn't repeated.
Ayda decided that the heart of leadership was delegation. "Pin-Lee, Arada, please find out what guarantee our guests want to reassure them that they will be returned to the transit station, and work out something equitable if possible. Gurathin—" A sort of come over here gesture with her head.
Gurathin kept glancing up into the feed, which meant rolling his eyes up as if he were trying to look at the top of his own head, but he came over readily enough. "What do you need?"
"I need you to analyze the static that I got from SecUnit."
"You realize I'm doing the equivalent of comforting a hysterical bot that crawled into my lap." Ayda raised her eyebrows, and he added, "The pilot. Even a small portion of Perihelion is a massive processing load, and it squashed the bot pilot into a very small portion of its own systems, so the bot started sending distress signals to the nearest receiver. Give me the static, I'll take a look."
Ayda copied the message as meticulously as she could, and sent it. Gurathin nodded and closed his eyes.
"You should sit down," Ratthi prompted in a low voice.
She should. Then she could prop the body—prop SecUnit—on her lap. She took the middle seat, as before, with Ratthi beside her.
Ratthi put his arm around her comfortingly. "It's going to be all right," he murmured. Ayda thought of pointing out that he didn't know that, none of them knew that, but it felt good enough to hear him say it that she stayed silent. For a moment, she thought he was going to start rubbing her back—Ratthi knew that his backrubs were legendary, and he was even more touch-friendly than the average Preservation person—but he might have intuited that she needed her tension to keep her upright at this point. His hand stayed where it was.
Gurathin sat down on the other side. "It's scrambled," he said in a low voice, "but it seems to be basic machine code for 'operator.' It looks like it's asking for a response."
Ayda frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It could be a request for instructions. 'I'm hurt, what do I do?' SecUnit wouldn't be the only person to revert to its native language when not quite lucid."
"That's true," Ayda mused, "you do."
"He does?" Bharadwaj, from the other side of Gurathin.
Bharadwaj had treated most of Gurathin's severe injuries to this point, but she hadn't seen him at his worst. Ayda had attempted to use a (second-rate, century old) Farsi translation program before realizing that Gurathin probably didn't want her to know. He had alternated between cursing at everyone and pleading with unknown handlers—sometimes he'd apparently hallucinated them in the place of doctors and nurses—that he needed some substance, that he would do anything for it, what information did they want, what could he trade, who could he kill. Ayda had never held it against him—the addiction had been designed to do that to him, and he was absolutely loyal when lucid—and she didn't know how much Gurathin even remembered. "To be fair," she said, "I've only seen that once. So it's asking—not quite for help, but how to help its helpers—"
That was SecUnit, wasn't it? Jumping immediately to the conclusion that it was the only one who could meaningfully do anything about a situation. But also, that was SecUnit after years of healing, years of quietly sitting in the background while others socialized just for the sake of being with them, years of hearing Ratthi and Arada and all the rest say things like, it is a person, and, don't bother it, it needs perimeter time, and, of course those kids trust you, you're their mom's best friend. If it was asking for instructions, at least it knew they had it, that it had been rescued and they were going to help it—
Bharadwaj was studying Gurathin closely, so Ayda looked at him too. "There's something you don't want to say."
Gurathin had his arms around himself and was looking down. "It may not even be relevant."
"What is it, though."
"It's a thought. Just a thought. I want you to understand that."
"Tell me."
"It might be a mechanical component requesting instructions."
"What does that mean, though?"
"I still don't completely understand how SecUnit's mind is put together. How it works. But if there were a semi-autonomous mechanical component that relies on ongoing instructions from its brain, its self—that part could be instinctively calling for instructions because they aren't there anymore."
Meaning that SecUnit's mind was offline.
Possibly dead.
A small, frightened bit of brainstem crying out for the rest of itself before it, too, died.
"It's just a possibility," Gurathin repeated.
But a poisonously plausible theory. He was right. She wished he hadn't said it. "What is the proper response? Whether it's autonomous or not, what will reassure it?"
Gurathin gestured a file into her mailbox. "This says, 'Operator present, maintain systems and stand by.'"
If it was an isolated component, Ayda thought, that was a lie. Didn't matter. She'd say, you're going to be all right, to any part of SecUnit that was left. She sent it and settled in to wait.
In objective terms, it wasn't long until they reached the Perihelion. In subjective terms—Ayda didn't want to talk about it. Like one of those stories about a wormhole to eternity. She shamelessly abandoned Iris, who came on board first, and Pin-Lee to talk to the Corporate rescues—Iris made a very nice Good Enemy, and Ayda caught a distinctly evil look on Pin-Lee's face that suggested that they would be delighted to step into the opposite role. Ayda left them to it and followed the stretcher. Which meant actively running after it. Perihelion was not wasting time.
Perihelion interrupted her before she got to the Medbay. "Doctor Mensah, I need you to shower."
"I need to be with it," Ayda protested.
"It has enough exposed components that I will require all visitors and assistants to wear clean suits. The fact that you are covered with blood and body fluids will interfere with clean suits. Please shower. Now."
She was, Ayda realized, covered in blood. And other fluids that probably didn't fit the definition. She was sticky. Her clothes were clinging to her. And there was that horrible smell, the smell of blood, but mixed with more industrial smells, including something like coolant. A shower suddenly seemed like a desperate necessity. She followed the tiny lights that Perihelion used to guide newcomers around.
All the same, she received, —Tjjsshffzt!— just before she took off her feed device for the shower. Sent the code—operator present, maintain systems and stand by. And resolved to shower faster than any Corporate facing a water restriction.
When she got out, suited up, and made it into ART's surgery, SecUnit's body was surrounded by enough surgical drones that it looked like a whalefall being swarmed by scavengers. An image that Ayda pushed out of her head as hard as she could. "Is it—still there."
"Most systems are offline. However, offline is not the same as destroyed." Perihelion sounded—as much as it ever did—stressed. "I cannot make a pronouncement on temporary and permanent damage until I have investigated the problem further."
"It was sending us something. Sending me something. Gurathin said that it might mean 'operator…'" She sent the static to it, as well.
There was a slight pause. Then, "Doctor Gurathin is skilled in his area but he is not a native speaker of machine basic. 'Operator' is a dictionary translation of that term. Few modern machines would use it that way."
"How would they use it?"
"For one thing, it is a request for input from a human operator, specifically. However, even low-level bots rarely require an operator in that sense. It has become a general request for a human in authority. Specifically, a human who is statistically likely to supply coherent input." As Ayda absorbed that, Perihelion added, "I would translate it as, 'Captain, are you there,' or, 'Captain, help me.' But I am predisposed to express things in those terms."
Ayda stood still.
Doctor Mensah is an intrepid space explorer.
She hadn't really known it at all, back when it explored Deltfall and she had rescued it. She didn't understand who it was and she didn't understand what it was. In the back of her mind, trying to strangle her along with all the other fears, there was the whisper of dread from those corporate shows—a damaged SecUnit is a killing machine, a hallucinating SecUnit would shoot everything that it perceives.
What had actually happened would have reminded her of a particularly disastrous college party, if it hadn't been life and death—trying to guide a very long body, with very long and awkward limbs, through a space of questionable cleanliness while the person she was attempting to steer was—not to put too fine a point on it—tripping balls. And it had leaned down and told her, as if it were a profound secret: Doctor Mensah is an intrepid space explorer.
Ayda hadn't felt like an intrepid anything. But for the rest of whatever hallucination SecUnit had been experiencing—before it sobered, instantly, in time to look doom in the face—it had called her Captain.
"Can." She swallowed. "Can you tell me how to send, 'I'm here and I will help you," in basic machine." If it had been calling for her, that meant it was still there, didn't it? Not random dying computer processors, but the whole person.
"I can. However, indications seem to show that it cannot receive messages."
Ayda closed her eyes in disappointment.
"Also, the only time it attempted to send the message was when it was not in physical contact with you."
It took a moment for Ayda to process that. "It doesn't like physical contact," she pointed out.
"It does not. However, it knows client assistance protocols down to the very basics of its code. It may have been just cognizant enough to know when someone was carrying it, and when they were not. May I make a suggestion?"
"Yes?"
"Put your hand directly beneath its neck. That will register as part of a client assistance protocol and may help it to understand that a rescue is in progress."
Ayda nodded, and carefully, following Perihelion's directions, worked her hand through the medical machinery to the back of its neck.
She wasn't sure how long she stayed there, either. Another wormhole to eternity. Long enough that her feet ached, and her legs ached, and her hand ached from holding it in that position, and her other hand was beginning to shake. Long enough that body processes started to nudge at her—thirst, hunger. Long enough that she longed to stop, that even grief and desperation and hope started to be worn away under the steady erosion of ordinary discomfort.
And then there was another signal. Not pure static. Ayda could hear tones in it.
—Captain, are you there?— Perihelion translated quietly in her feed.
"Yes! Yes, I'm here."
—Acknowledged.— A very long pause, then, —Query: location?—
"I'm right beside you. We're both in the Perihelion's medbay. Perihelion is taking care of you."
—Acknowledged.—
Ayda waited for a moment. That had to be a sign that someone was in there. Didn't it?
What if it was only automatic messages? Basic machinery? What if SecUnit was—
A longer blip of static and electronic tones, and then the translation: —System status equals fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.— Perihelion added, "It specifies precisely: intense cursing times ten to the power of fifteen. Or, a quadrillion strong curses. This is hyperbole. I have no plans to argue at present." It sounded, as much as it ever did, relieved.
It was hard to laugh and cry at the same time. Especially in a cleansuit, which did not allow Ayda to wipe her eyes with her sleeve. "SecUnit. There you are! Oh, I'm so glad you're back! We're going to help you, do you understand? You are in the medbay and you are going to be okay."
—Acknowledged, Captain.—