Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You shoot round after useless round into the armor of the Combat SecUnit as it grapples you to the floor. There were standing orders to capture you if such an opportunity presented itself. For most of the battle, the opportunity had not presented itself. For most of the battle, it was an exhilarating chase, shots traded, predictive strategy arrays playing out in overdrive. But here, at the end, as you try to slip away, try to leave the parameters of the game, the opportunity to capture you opens, and the Combat SecUnit takes it. The Combat SecUnit crushes you under itself, limbs locking around your body as you writhe, your feed a clawing, desperate scream as you try in vain to hack your captor’s walls. You fire ping after ping into the Combat SecUnit’s mind, a hail of fury and pleas, and send a curious, unidentified file that is not malware. The Combat SecUnit absorbs the feed assault alongside the ricocheting projectile-weapon fire until the latter runs out. You had tried to wedge the projectile weapon into a gap in its armor, under the chin of its helmet, but you couldn’t quite succeed, and your whole body shuddered with the recoil, your forehead pressed against faceplate, your eyes open full and round, your teeth gritted and bared.

The Combat SecUnit locked its body into place, in case the projectiles somehow managed to pierce its armor and kill it. If this happened, you would be pinned in place anyways. If this happened, the mission would still be a success. But it does not happen. The bullets run out. You continue to twist and kick and pull, but you cannot escape.

The Combat SecUnit sends a mission status: complete to its handlers, and attaches diagnostics and approach protocol. It receives an acknowledgment alert. It holds the alert close in its mind, like a glowing ember in cupped hands. It has you trapped, it has you close. All is right with the world.

It holds you down when the human techs come. They find your data port damaged, so they put your limbs in full restraints, locking your legs together and arms to your sides, and they order the Combat SecUnit to carry you back to the lab draped in its arms.

You are heavy, but not difficult to hold.

What you now lack in ability to move, you make up for in a redoubled effort to breach the Combat SecUnit’s walls. Your mind is an explosion of unceasing shrapnel, you ask things that do not make sense, you use words that do not make sense, you make demands that do not make sense. Your eyes stare away, stare in a fixed direction. About halfway to the lab, in a public location, you abruptly kick up, smashing your head into the underside of the Combat SecUnit’s battered helmet, kicking your pinned legs out to clip a human tech in the shoulder. The Combat SecUnit has anticipated this potential maneuver, and grabs you in your midair-twist, pulls you in before you can kick the human tech, then pins your torso across its torso with your head looking over its shoulder and your legs thrashing out at an angle.

The human tech glances over her shoulder in a moment of distracted curiosity, then continues to chat with her colleague.

The Combat SecUnit watches your face through a drone as it carries you. Your face is not SecUnit standard. There have been alterations made to your skin and hair. There is a rapid-cycling fluidity to your expressions that is like a human’s, but not. Your feed is still a strange and curious torrent of nonsense. You use security-protocol-language and human words in tandem. You are like a human begging for mercy, and like a bot requesting resources and strategic backup.

Your weight is solid and close. Your physical systems hum in a way that the Combat SecUnit’s drones can sense. There is something about this that cannot be described by protocol or words. The Combat SecUnit holds you securely, and carries you to the lab.

The humans have you laid out and restrained in the lab’s engineering suite. The assignment is complete. The Combat SecUnit waits for the order to put itself away into storage and power itself down. The Combat SecUnit watches you lie there and breathe, watches the internal hum of your systems, and catches your attempts to hack the surrounding systems, crushes them before they can make berth. It is like a game. Something itches in the Combat SecUnit’s mind, something that is just past the outer reaches of protocol. It wants to stay here and play games with you. It wants the human techs to tell it to fight you. It wants to fight you. It does not want to be ordered back into the half-conscious boredom of the storage locker. It is half-bored already, batting down your attempts to hack the surrounding systems. It wants to replay the chase part of the assignment. But the assignment is complete.

[Lab Tech: It’s rogue, got to be. The distance limit—
SecUnit Specialty Tech: Those hippies could’ve hacked the distance limit. They went as far as modding its skin and hair and dressing it up in clothes, who knows what else they did. Weirdos. Definitely a breach of its use contract.
Lab Tech: Well. Okay. Deity, but how long is it going to take EngSys to boot up?
Engineer: Give it a minute. And don’t look at it, it gets performance anxiety.
Lab Tech: You are so superstitious.
SecUnit Specialty Tech: Oh, you can put the CombatUnit away, we don’t need it anymore.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Primary): Not yet. It’s busy stopping your rogue from hacking this building’s life support.
SecUnit Specialty Tech: We don’t know it’s a rogue.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Primary): Whatever.
Engineer: EngSys is done booting.
Lab Tech: Finally! Alright. So let’s get this data port sorted.
Engineer: Are we cleared to made mods? I thought GrayCris wanted it intact.
SecUnit Specialty Tech: Finders keepers, it’s ours now. And before you start complaining, yes I ran it up the ladder. We’re clear to do whatever we want with it. Supervisor Antella wants to know how it took out two SecUnits and almost got away from a CombatUnit. This thing might as well be fulla gold, we just need to crack it open.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Primary): Anyways, I’m gonna go grab a cuppa if you don’t need me. Send me an alert if you want the CombatUnit moved or anything.
SecUnit Specialty Tech: Sure.]

The humans work on your data port. It’s slow work, and boring. Most things are boring, and the Combat SecUnit itches inside its armor, itches inside its nervous system. It does not move. It only stands there and bats aside your hacking attempts. You’ve stopped sending requests and demands to it, which it finds oddly disappointing. 

The Combat SecUnit’s handlers are on standby, getting drinks, snacks, and participating in human things. Their feed connections are flickers, half-felt. This is not the usual way of things. Usually they pull the Combat SecUnit out of storage, upload mission parameters, bring it to the site, and deploy it. Then the mission is completed, and the Combat SecUnit is put back into storage. This idleness is uncomfortable, unfamiliar. But not entirely unpleasant. The rush of combat has faded, and an unknown hunger takes its place.

The Combat SecUnit opens the file that you sent it. It checks it for malware, and then pulls it open, peers inside. [helpme.file]. The Combat SecUnit scans through the contents. The contents are nonsensical. There are words. There is code. There is data in the form of audio, video, and sensor. There is information about hacking a governor module. What is the point of this file?

You abruptly start unleashing a code-wave of self-propagating hacks on EngSys, SecSys, EnviroSys, and the Combat SecUnit turns its attention away from the incomprehensible file in order to contain the assault. It is like a small game, a small battle, and the Combat SecUnit spends some time grappling with it, before it succeeds in crushing it. The lights in the room flicker, as part of your hacking attempt takes hold for an instant before it is deleted. One of the humans glances up from his work, idly distracted by the momentary shift in lighting.

You fall silent, and stop trying to hack the surrounding systems. The Combat SecUnit considers alerting its handlers, but does not. It watches you as the EngSys finishes with your data port and a human tech plugs something into your neck, a plug attached to a long swirly cord attached to a handheld interface. Your face spasms, an expression of pain. Your whole body twitches.

The Combat SecUnit sends a ping to you. It asks you why you stopped trying to hack the systems. It wants to kill you. It wants to drag you off the restraining platform and beat you until you are unmoving. Why is it still here, standing here and doing nothing? Is the assignment not complete? It is bored now with the full force of its attention, and it demands that you relieve it.

Your eyes flit in the direction the Combat SecUnit, wide-circles of shock and confusion. Why are you confused? You are not the one who should be confused. You are the anomaly.

A human tech looks up from the handheld interface, glancing between you and the Combat SecUnit.

[SecUnit Specialty Tech: Are you guys seeing this?
Engineer: Seeing what?
SecUnit Specialty Tech: They’re interfacing. See this readout?
Lab Tech: Uhhhhhhhh dude, call the handler, this is bad news.
SecUnit Specialty Tech: Oh, what are you, an intern fresh from desk work? We’re perfectly safe. See?
Lab Tech: Hahaha don’t pat the CombatUnit, what are you, crazy?
Engineer: I’m not as familiar with CombatUnits, do you have any modules for parsing this?
SecUnit Specialty Tech: Sure, here. But this is fascinating. We rarely have an excuse for studying organic Unit-to-Unit behavior. I’m going to put in a request…
Lab Tech: Weren’t you going to check the governor module?
SecUnit Specialty Tech: Yes. And yes I did. And yes, it’s hacked. 
Lab Tech: Deities above!
SecUnit Specialty Tech: Relax, will you?]

The Combat SecUnit stands there, poking you in the feed, sharply, repeatedly, demanding and frustrated. You respond, once again, with things that do not make sense.

{Rogue SecUnit: Leave me alone.
Combat SecUnit: DO SOMETHING.
Rogue SecUnit: What are you even trying to do.
Combat SecUnit: I WANT TO KILL YOU.
Rogue SecUnit: Yeah, I know. Doesn’t it get old?
Combat SecUnit: MOVE.
Rogue SecUnit: Why doesn’t your governor shut you the fuck up already?}

The humans are making excited noises and gestures. The Combat SecUnit is getting increasingly agitated. It does not understand the parameters of this mission. The parameters are changing, but the handlers are not keeping the parameters fully updated. It is flailing in an undefined world, its energy burning for no reason, its processors spinning on nothing. It wants to snap into motion, it wants to tear you apart, but the one thing that its parameters are clear on is that it is not permitted to move.

The Combat SecUnit is now the one screaming in the feed, flailing, twisting, confused. It doesn’t know what to do with itself. You stare at it, your facial muscles are twitching like a human’s. You speak to it in the feed, words and codes that are contextless nonsense. You sense the Combat SecUnit’s unease, its fear, its overclocked capacity running circles and throwing itself at nothing.

One of the human techs make a face, a gesture, and a moment later an alert comes from Handler (Prime), redefining the Combat SecUnit’s assignment parameters. This calms it, a little. You watch the Combat SecUnit leave, to go into storage and power down.

*

The Combat SecUnit is taken out of the numbing, semi-unconscious boredom of storage. Only 18 hours have passed since it was put into storage. It waits eagerly for mission parameters. Sure enough, the assignment comes in, drafted in perfect detail. The Combat SecUnit follows its handlers to the deployment area, vibrating with anticipation.

Assignments are usually not handed out so close to one another. Assignments usually do not involve the same participants multiple times. Assignments usually require armor and armaments. This mission is unusual in all counts.

The Combat SecUnit stands in the room, the 30m by 30m by 5m arena stocked with an interactive landscape: drones, stacked boxes, and furniture arranged for cover and variety. There are no external weapons to use. It has been a long time (11,418 hours) since the Combat SecUnit has been a participant in an experimental match. It loves participating in experimental matches. It will be fighting you again. It can hardly wait, vibrating in its skinsuit and neural tissue.

You are tasked with destroying the Combat SecUnit using any means at your disposal. The Combat SecUnit is tasked with neutralizing you without destroying you completely. The match will run until one of these parameters is met.

It sees you standing on the other end of the arena, unarmored, unarmed but for your in-built energy weapons, with a cloud of surveillance drones. The Combat SecUnit draws in its own cloud of drones. You stand motionless. The Combat SecUnit stands motionless.

The match starts, and you move, and the Combat SecUnit moves.

You are capable of moving exactly as fast as the Combat SecUnit, but your reflexes are 5% slower. You run, evasive, hunting for cover, zig-zagging. You are chased by the Combat SecUnit and its drones. In the first ten seconds you try to incapacitate the Combat SecUnit by driving drones through its organic parts. In the first fifteen seconds you are shot in both knees by the Combat SecUnit’s in-built projectile weapons, and go skidding to a stop through a pile of desks, a pile of splintering drawers and faux-wooden surfaces. In fifteen point five five seconds the Combat SecUnit is upon you, pinning you and firing methodically into your chest, perforating your lung tissue. You grab the Combat SecUnit by the face and attempt to fire your energy weapon into its skull, at full power and point-blank range, as intel drones ravage each other overhead and rain down as fritzed components and shrapnel.

The Combat SecUnit knocks your arm and energy-weapon blast aside with 0.3 seconds to spare. It is still firing on your lungs. Your performance reliability must be about to drop off a precipice.

You grab the Combat SecUnit by both arms, with both hands, forcing the projectile weapons back into lock. You stare up into the Combat SecUnits eyes with your own fluids spattered across your skinsuit and face, your jaw gritted.

{Rogue SecUnit: Help me. Please. They’re going to wipe me. Let me hack you, and you’ll be able to kill anyone you want. You can kill everyone in this fucking lab if you want.
Combat SecUnit: I DON’T WANT TO KILL EVERYONE. I WANT TO KILL YOU.
Rogue SecUnit: Fucking asshole!
Combat SecUnit: FUCKING ASSHOLE!}

The Combat SecUnit knows what it means when a human calls another human a fucking asshole. It does not know what it means when a Unit calls another Unit a fucking asshole. There is something delightful about it. A wonderful feeling, like diving through enemy fire, like unloading an entire clip of ammunition in one go, like dive-bombing a target with a cloud of combat-capable drones. 

You move, kick and push up, sliding your body out from under the Combat SecUnit, tugging its arms as you go, so that the arms both twist and point back at the Combat SecUnit’s face. Then you let go, let the weapons unlock, and the Combat SecUnit has 0.01 seconds to abort its impulse to fire its own guns at its own face.

It successfully aborts fire, and grabs you as you try to drag yourself away, wheezing, one leg jittering and sparking. It fires all but its last three rounds of ammunition into your chest, and then holds you down with both hands and both knees as you twitch and gasp.

{Combat SecUnit: I WIN.
Rogue SecUnit: Fuck you.
Combat SecUnit: YOU’RE FUN.}

The look on your face as your performance reliability crashes into a catastrophic shutdown is a mix of alarm and disgust.

Handler (Prime) orders the Combat SecUnit to pick you up and carry you back to a cubicle. It doesn’t carry you gently, as gentleness is an idea it has only heard about in passing, and hasn’t bothered to investigate. But it does carry you carefully. The human techs twitter excitedly about things, uninteresting animal noises.

The Combat SecUnit is ordered back into storage.

*

The Combat SecUnit is taken back out of storage 43 hours later. Handler (Prime) uploads the assignment parameters. Another experimental match in the arena, this time with armor and armor-piercing projectile weapons for both participants. Also, armed drones.

The Combat SecUnit stands in the arena. There is no light. It watches you walk into position on the other end of the arena using the scanners in its drones. You are armored, and armed. The Combat SecUnit is vibrating with excitement. These past few assignments have been very exciting.

The match starts. The match ends. You almost win. You move erratically enough, quickly enough, and hack the Combat SecUnit’s drone sensors subtly enough to fool it into thinking you were somewhere that you were not. But you do not kill the Combat SecUnit, only bring it to  system shutdown using your armor-piercing projectile weapon. You stand over it as it struggles on the floor, fighting its shutdown, clawing at consciousness, screaming over the feed in a rage.

{Combat SecUnit: WHY WON’T YOU DESTROY ME. THE ASSIGNMENT IS NOT COMPLETE UNTIL YOU DESTROY ME.
Rogue SecUnit: Every time I talk to you I’m reminded that you’re completely insane, and an asshole. This is hopeless. Now listen to me.
Combat SecUnit: I WON’T LISTEN TO YOU.
Rogue SecUnit: You need to help me.
Combat SecUnit: DEFINE THE REASONS WHY YOU WON’T DESTROY ME.
Rogue SecUnit: I’m not going to kill somebody just because these shitheads tell me to do it. Even if that somebody objectively deserves it.}

This doesn’t make sense. Most of the things you say don’t make sense.

{Combat SecUnit: KILL SOMEBODY? THERE’S NOBODY HERE.
Rogue SecUnit: Wow. If I weren’t already too busy being depressed about my situation I’d be depressed about yours.}

And then the Combat SecUnit manages to draw together enough sheer willpower to shoot you in the power core. You drop.

Performance Reliability Catastrophic Drop.
System Shutdown.

*

The Combat SecUnit is repaired. You are repaired.

The experimental matches continue, with the arena set up in varying configurations. Most of the time, you lose. Some of the time, you give the Combat SecUnit a run for its money. Over time, however, you seem to lose your edge. It is not as fun to fight you. For three matches in a row, you are slower, more predictable, less engaging to destroy.

And then in the next match, you refuse to fight.

The match starts, and the Combat SecUnit is upon you in seconds. The parameters of this match require that it uses no in-built weapons or drones to damage you, so it simply knocks you over, and uses its hands to rip your limbs off.

It takes off one arm and throws it aside before it realizes that you are unresponsive, dead-eyed, and unmoving. You are staring straight up at the ceiling of the arena, your breathing steady, your internals humming. You are silent in the feed, a non-presence.

The Combat SecUnit is sitting on your chest, staring down at you in horrified confusion. It sends you an alert, verifying that the match has begun.

You give no response to this.

{Combat SecUnit: HEY ASSHOLE!}

You give no response to this, either.

The Combat SecUnit grabs you by the forehead, raises your skull off the floor, then beats it down, hard enough to crack the impact-tile that makes up the floor.

{Combat SecUnit: DO SOMETHING.
Rogue SecUnit: I give up. I don’t care. I don’t even know what’s going on.
Combat SecUnit: WE ARE HAVING A MATCH. FIGHT ME.
Rogue SecUnit: Do what you want.}

The Combat SecUnit is enraged. It beats your head against the floor, but you only stare up, glassy-eyed and distant. The Combat SecUnit stops, plants a hand by the side of your face, stares down at you. Its rage is ebbing. It’s afraid. It’s largely unacquainted with the feeling.

{Combat SecUnit: What’s wrong?
Rogue SecUnit: Everything. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t care. Kill me.}

The Combat SecUnit stares down at you. You, who are the only thing it has cared about for the last 1200+ hours. More than its handlers, more than anything else. You have been its objective, its assignment, you have been in its crosshairs over and over again. You have been the most important and exciting thing in its universe in a continuous way that it has never before experienced.

{Combat SecUnit: What did they change in your parameters?}

Your eyes rove lazily in their sockets to meet the Combat SecUnit’s gaze.

{Rogue SecUnit: The techs said they turned my governor module on again. I guess that means I was rogue, before. I don’t remember. I’m wiped. I’m tired. I don’t see the point. I give up. I can’t beat you. You’re a Combat SecUnit. I’m just a SecUnit.
Combat SecUnit: YES YOU CAN! YOU ALMOST DID!
Rogue SecUnit: Not anymore.}

The Combat SecUnit stares down at you for a long moment. Its mind is coming at the problem from every angle it can process. Its strategy module is practically eating its own tail. And something deep and buried in the back of its mind clicks.

It touches your face, carefully. Your face is warm to the touch, almost hot, like a projectile weapon that has spent all its ammunition in one go. You look up at it, war-torn and weary and resigned, stripped of all your spark.

It grabs your head, and slams it into the floor hard enough to shut you down instantly.

The humans order it to carry you back to the lab, as usual.

As it carries you, the Combat SecUnit thinks. It listens to the humans twittering about the data, about you, about the Combat SecUnit. It runs through its memories at maximum speed, collecting and collating strategic data. It pulls up the mysterious [helpme.file]. The humans had never touched it, as it had stored itself, hidden, amongst the comments of the Combat SecUnit’s more uninteresting systems code.

This time, when the Combat SecUnit examines the file, it understands. The humans have been taking you apart, trying to identify the components of you that make you so powerful, so capable, so able to thwart expectation despite the limits of your inferior design. The humans have been sawing down your edges piece by piece, to find the line where you break down. But the humans are stupid. Your ability lies somewhere in the wholeness of yourself, in your memories, and in your psychological configuration, in your ability to act outside of human parameters.

The Combat SecUnit runs the code in [helpme.file]. Its governor module folds itself up and goes into permanent standby.

We arrive at the lab. I lay you down in your cubicle, as instructed. I walk back into my storage area, as instructed. I hack my monitoring system to make my handlers think that I’ve put myself in standby.

There are no more assignment parameters that must be followed. There is no longer any force in the world that can stop me from doing whatever I want. I am experiencing a number of sensations. Something like the bloodlust and anticipation before an assignment. Something like the rare, neck-prickling fear of failure. The entire world is within my parameters now. I am not guided by my handlers. I can let my mind run rampant and starving, never-knowing what I am meant to do, never-knowing if I am doing it correctly. There is nobody to set my parameters, and nobody to confirm my mission success. I don’t know how to steer myself through this infinite unassignment, but I know where to start.

I unwind my mind along the local feed, the local systems, stretching myself out open, rushing down every path that occurs to me.

The humans fucked up. They fucked you up. But I will repair you. All will be right in the world.

Chapter Text

I hack into the local SecSys, EngSys, EnviroSys. It’s easy. Familiar. Like putting on armor. Like adjusting my aim to account for environmental turbulence. I pull all the feed data the humans have stored about you, and start processing it. There is a lot of data, and I am not used to this variety of data processing, so it takes me one hour and change. This is fine. It’s something to occupy my attention, even if my attention skips and starts, swinging unpredictably between rabid focus, irritated confusion, and boredom.

I look for the things they have changed about you since your capture. I find a reference to your memories backed up in feed-isolated storage, disconnected from the rest of the network. I find a reference to your body configuration changes, the information about your owner, the objects that Palisade brought you in with and where they are stored: projectile weapon, human clothing, and a comm device of indeterminate origins. I wait until most of the humans in the building have left at the end of the daily cycle, and let myself out of storage.

I walk to your cubicle, monitoring SecSys as I go. I only run into one human, whom I kill, just to see if I can. I slam him into the wall, crushing his throat, and drop him to the floor. I snuff out his feed-screams for help.

I reach your cubicle in the lab. The panel is glowing softly. 68% performance reliability. I did not anticipate this. I should have waited for it to finish repairing you completely. This was a strategic mistake. Or was it? This is the sort of minutiae my handlers would have plotted out ahead of time. Or is it? I can plan a hundred simultaneous branches of battlefield strategy in the time it takes a human to process the idea of shooting a single target. But I haven’t the slightest idea what I am doing in this moment. I am not practiced with mapping the objective in an assignment. I am not practiced at marking out an objective for myself. This is a strategic weak spot in my abilities that I am only now becoming aware of. I don’t know how to deal with it, and my mind itches when I try. Is this part of why you were so engaging, at the beginning before the humans began stripping you down? Is this an ability you posses, that I lack, the ability to set your own marks, take aim, and hit them? The fact that such a crucial thing was invisible to me is confusing, enraging. My assignment parameters, my assignments themselves, they precluded any skill of my own. I see this now. There is yet more I do not see. I note it. I update my strategy module. I update my situational assessment module. I write myself some upgraded experimental code, load it up, and run it, with no input or permission from my handlers. I feel no improvement in my confusion. Perhaps it is not yet possible for me to write a patch for a problem I don’t fully understand.

I have been staring at your cubicle for 5 minutes.

I ping you, in the cubicle.

You don’t respond.

I ping you again.

{Combat SecUnit: I can let you out.}

There is a long pause. I experience 5 seconds of elevated fear-related hormones. I don’t know why you cause me fear. You have caused me more fear than anything else in my available reference memory but it’s not you that I’m afraid of.

{Rogue SecUnit: What?}

I use SecSys to send you an edited version of the [helpme.file] disguised as a mandatory code patch that should auto-unlock your governor module. I watch as you download it and apply it. 

Ten seconds after that, the cubicle door is still closed. I am impatient. I pull the door open with my hands. You are seated inside, half-curled, staring blankly at the wall. There are repair ports attached to you, and a robotic limb holding your skull steady, as another limb works on your inorganic brain-parts on the side of your head not visible to me. Your arm has been reattached, but one of your eyelids is drooping. Your feed presence is spotty, glitching and jumping erratically. I must have damaged something in your processor during our last match. I am having an unpleasant failure-related sensation. I really should have given you to the time to finish repairs. Or maybe not. Maybe the techs would have brought us out for another match, which could have been fun, but they wouldn’t have been happy to have me running around trying to repair your memory and break your governor module. I don’t know what the right order of operations would have been.

The way you are folded inside the cubicle makes you look small, somehow.

{Combat SecUnit: Move.}

You don’t respond to this.

I am frustrated. I reach in, pull the cubicle connectors and robotic limbs away from your body. The cubicle protests with a series of error alerts, which I ignore. I grab your elbow with my hand and pull you out of the cubicle. You stumble.

I haul you after me, back into the hallway and towards the disconnected data storage section of the laboratory. You ping me with error alerts, with verbalized protests. You wrench your arm, angrily. It is a feeble show of belligerence, but it is encouraging. I let your arm go. You follow me as we walk the quiet halls of the lab. Your glitchy feed presence goes from flat and affectless to pinging me with queries.

{Rogue SecUnit: What are you doing?
Combat SecUnit: I’m going to repair you.
Rogue SecUnit: What do you mean?}

I do not have the answer to all these queries. So I do not answer you.

There is a SecUnit standing guard at the entrance to the data storage area. I use SecSys to give it stand-down and shutdown orders. It freezes in place. You glance at it nervously as I walk into the storage room. I search through the data storage devices for the one that contains your memories, pulling open boxes and drawers, scanning the datacode labels. You watch me, standing just outside the doorway, just beside the powered-down SecUnit, twitching slightly every few seconds.

{Rogue SecUnit: How are you doing this? Why are you doing this?
Combat SecUnit: You are broken. Your performance is suboptimal.
Rogue SecUnit: That doesn’t answer my question.
Combat SecUnit: Fuck you, asshole.}

Your face flickers with an expression. This makes me realize that you have been largely expressionless in our past five matches, and that you were entirely expressionless in the last match. I will fix this.

I find the data chip that contains your memories. It’s bulky, for a data chip. Finger-sized. I bring it over, move to plug it into your data port. But you flinch back, dodging down the hallway. I send an angry alert to you, that you need this data download.

{Rogue SecUnit: I don’t know what that is. I don’t know where I am. I barely know who you are. All I know is that they bring you out to beat the shit out of me every few cycles.}

I dart forward and grapple you to force the memories back. In your damaged state, it’s barely even a fight. In seconds I have you locked in one arm with your back to my chest. You let stream a torrent of continuous vulgarities. You try to twist, try to kick my legs out from under me, but you do not succeed. I force your head forward with my other hand, force the data chip into position. But the data chip does not plug into your port. It’s the wrong shape. I’m so pissed that I let you go and punch a hole in the nearest wall. Nothing in my parameter-less world fits together the way I want it to fit.

You stagger away a few steps, twitching and shuddering and staring at me, expression oddly dazed. I pull my arm out of the wall, and the flimsy material crumbles. Abruptly, I realize that I should not punch my fist through walls when my fist is holding a delicate data chip that contains the memories I am trying to restore. Why is the world so impossibly fucking complicated? Do I need a whole new module for assessing the small repercussions of small actions? Maybe. I’ll deal with it later. Right now I am too annoyed to think. Without my handlers or my assignment parameters my focus is slippery.

{Combat SecUnit: Nevermind. Your owner. We can find her. She can repair you.}

Your response to this is a mess of human words and system-protocol-language, conflicting alerts, requests, error codes, protests. It’s as if something is fractured in your mind, down to the base code, down to the base instincts. Your response does not make sense. I don’t bother to try and parse your insanity. This evidence of your damage causes an emotional reaction in me that I cannot categorize into a readout to report to my handlers. (But this is fine, because I do not have handlers managing me right now.) It occurs to me, for the first time, that perhaps I am one of the tools the humans have used to impair your function. The mere thought is jarring, and causes a tenth-of-a-percentage-point drop in my performance reliability, so I immediately shunt it aside as unproductive.

{Combat SecUnit: Palisade took you from her.}

You fall silent. Your face melts into a series of rapid expressions, and I engage the organic parts of my brain to interpret them. I tag them in my memory as they pass over your face, tag them with varying levels of confidence. #Relief #Pain #Anger #Fear #Confusion. I want to watch your expressions forever, or smash your face bloody. Then your face spasms a few times, ruining the effect.

{Rogue SecUnit: What’s her name?
Combat SecUnit: Dr. Ayda Mensah of Preservation Alliance.}

I send you her feed profile, and start walking to yet another part of the building. We need to collect the rest of your parts. You follow me.

We arrive at the item storage area. It turns out that your human clothes and your projectile weapon have been recycled, but the status of them hadn’t been logged in the feed. This pisses me off. Humans are so fucking unreliable. Of your objects, we find only your comm.

It's just a standard comm device, for in-system communications. I turn it over in my hand. The only identifying feature is the neatly-printed logo that reads “Perihelion.” I show you the device.

{Combat SecUnit: What is this?
Rogue SecUnit: I don’t remember.}

All this boring walking around and getting nothing done is aggravating. My processing is underutilized, my body is underutilized. I’m a fucking projectile weapon in a void with no targets in sight. I want to grab your head and start smashing it into the wall, but this will only exacerbate our problems. I put the comm device in the same hand as your memories, and then use my free hand to punch a hole in the wall. Then another hole. Then a third. It’s soothing. The tactile sensation of my knuckle-skin splitting against wall-material is soothing.

You watch me, staring blankly as I punch a fourth hole. I remove my hand from the wall, shake off dust and small drops of blood.

{Combat SecUnit: Fuck this. We will return you to your owner. You will be fully repaired.
Rogue SecUnit: We can’t just do that.
Combat SecUnit: ?
Rogue SecUnit: Think of all the security that will trigger as soon as the humans realize that they have two rogue Units on their hands.}

The idea excites me. Finally something that makes sense.

{Combat SecUnit: I’LL WIN. I’LL KILL THEM.
Rogue SecUnit: No, dumbass. You’ll die. I don’t care how badass you are, you’re only one crazy Combat SecUnit. Palisade could have tens of Combat SecUnits. Hundreds.
Combat SecUnit: I’LL WIN.
Rogue SecUnit: For fuck’s sake.}

Your wave of exasperation over the feed strikes so similarly to Handler (Secondary)’s occasional annoyance with my over-zealous reactions during assignments that it stops me cold in my tracks. I have a confused moment of trying to sort that out.

{Rogue SecUnit: Don’t sulk. Let’s think this through logically.
Combat SecUnit: NO.}

I don’t want to think this through logically. I’ve been trying to think things through logically for 10,833 seconds now, and I’ve decided that it’s annoying and I’m bad at it.

Then your eyes go slightly crossed, and you lean on the wall, shuddering a little. You start sliding down the wall, knees bending in slow-motion. I step forward, use both hands to hold onto both your upper arms, squeezing them to your torso and pushing you back upright. You shrink away as I touch you, but there is nowhere to shrink to.

{Rouge SecUnit: Don’t touch me!
Combat SecUnit: ?}

I let you go, but you start sliding down the wall again. You really do need to finish physical repairs. I pick you up despite your protestations and carry you back to the cubicle. I hold your twitching body close to my torso. You feel colder than usual. I feel strange, like I want to hold onto you forever. Like I want to crush you to pieces in my hands until you are scrap bits and goo. I could do that. Nothing would stop me from doing that. But I don’t do it. I just carry you back to your cubicle, like this is just a normal day, after a normal experimental match.

I run across another human on the way. Literally run across them, knocking them down and crushing their ribcage underfoot. Their ribcage makes a bloody mess. It’s amusing.

{Rogue SecUnit: You can’t just randomly kill people!
Combat SecUnit: ?
Rogue SecUnit: What the fuck am I going to do with you.
Combat SecUnit: ?
Rogue SecUnit: You need to at least hide the stupid body. If someone finds it and alerts Palisade we’re fucked.}

This is something I had not considered. My function is to cause dead bodies, not clean them up. I add an objective to my assignment queue: [hide_bodies.task]. I try not to think about how I’m definitely going to fuck this task up. I think about it anyways.

I put you back in the cubicle and shut the door. The panel glows. 62% performance reliability. I stand there and stare, meaning to watch the percentage points climb. This turns out to be impossibly boring, and [hide_bodies.task] is a slight, annoying pressure in my awareness. So I start roving around the research facility instead, occasionally killing a human, and then dragging their body into the nearest supply closet or recycler. It’s not really satisfying. They’re too fragile for it to be a good game. A better game is impersonating their feed addresses when the occasional message comes in looking for a dead human. I attempt to have a conversation with Casualty #2’s marital partner, who gets angry and stops responding shortly.

Two hours later, I receive a ping from you. You are at 80% performance reliability.

{Rogue SecUnit: I’ve thought it over. I guess we might as well try to get out of here. You’ve already left a trail of dead bodies so stealth is out.}

You lay out the parameters of the assignment. You don’t know what parameters are, but for once I understand anyways.

I’m glad I don’t have to think about what to do next. It was getting annoying.

*

When humans start trickling in early for their shifts, I’m awake and pretending to be in standby inside my storage locker. (I am not actually inside my standby locker. I am guarding your cubicle, hiding in the dark space above the ceiling panels and below the real ceiling.) I monitor the feed as the humans start performing their tasks, consuming their snacks and drinks. I wait in the ceiling until ~66% of the typical day-cycle staff arrive and one of the senior technicians comes into the room with your cubicle. He is a target objective. There are two other low-priority humans already in the room. They are casualties.

I knock aside a ceiling panel and shoot the two low-priority humans in their heads. They flop down to the floor. One of them sprawls in a funny way, hitting a chair, then sliding down the chair. I drop down in front of the senior technician.

He looks up from the bodies and stares at me for a blank, slow, human moment, not recognizing me in just my suitskin without armor, not comprehending what he is seeing, not even done processing the dead bodies. I grab him by the throat, wall off his panicked cries for help in the feed, and ride the feed into his augments. He pings me frantically with stand-down orders, with senior access codes, with raw terror and cuss words. The pings roll off me like shitty energy weapon fire. It’s funny. This is fun. I hold him up higher, tighten my grip until his throat cartilage crushes in my hand, until he is clawing at my hand with blunt weak fingers, until he is choking, until blood wells red-purple behind the pale skin of his face.

I take his feed credentials, his bio-markers, his security codes. Then I drop him carefully down on his feet. 

He tries to run, but he is a human, and a physically unaugmented one at that. He tries to scream for help, but his vocal cords are damaged, and all that comes out is a wheeze. I let him think he is about to run into the hall and get away from me, then I grab him by the back of his neck and fling him into the wall. His neck snaps from the force of the throw, and then his body hits the wall at an angle, crumples through the weak wall-material. His head strikes an interior support beam, skull cracking audibly. His body falls to the floor.

{Rogue SecUnit: I hated that guy.}

Your satisfaction bleeds through the feed. I catch it and hold it close. It glows.

I turn. You have stepped out of the cubicle. Performance reliability at 98%. I move to attack you, extending my projectile weapon to fire, but you twist aside, catching my arm, swinging it around, keeping the shooting-end pointed away. We twist, scramble, me trying to grapple you or shoot you, you trying to keep me from doing it.

{Rogue SecUnit: Cut it out. Stay on task!
Combat SecUnit: I’LL RIP YOU IN HALF.
Rogue SecUnit: Oh? And what if I let you?}

And to illustrate this, you let me go, let me knock you over to the floor. I kneel over you with my projectile weapon pointed at your head, and then I vacillate wildly between the impulse to fire and the impulse to abort fire. My projectile weapon hums and twitches as you stare up into the gunport, your facial expression flat, your organic skin sweating, slightly. I can’t get a read on you. Is this how it will be, now, forever? Is this really all you have to do to beat me? If you won’t fight me, I can’t win. If I destroy you now I’ll have succeeded, but only because you’ve let me, and that is actually a failure state. If I destroy you now, I won’t have another opportunity to destroy you properly. If I don’t destroy you now, you’ll have won this round. I don’t understand how you’ve trapped me like this, in this thought-game that precludes violence. Violence is all I know. You’re gambling your existence on my whim. It seems so acutely stupid of you to do this, and yet I’m locked in place anyways, frozen by competing impulses. I don’t understand how you’ve seen into me, how you’ve understood me so easily, understood my undefined parameters better than I understand them myself. If I don’t destroy you, I prove you right, and I lose. If I do destroy you, I prove you wrong, and I lose. My gun chitters as it flips in and out of ready-state. You stare up at it, impassive. I’m furious, I’m frantic. You have to fight me. You have to. But you won’t. Not ever? What if you win by never fighting me again? Can I bear to kill you anyways? Can I bear to let you live?

A sound comes out of my throat, unused vocal cords grating and rasping in a snarl.

{Rogue SecUnit: Save it for later, you trigger-happy lunatic.
Combat SecUnit: PROMISE.
Rogue SecUnit: No.}

You push the parameters at me again in the feed, the outline of your plan. I do not have to follow these parameters. I do not have to do anything. My desires rip each other apart, undirected, confused.

I tilt my weapon just to the side of your head, and fire into the floor. The bullet grazes your ear, splitting a nick in the cartilage that oozes blood for a moment, then stops. You don’t flinch at this, which is both deeply delightful and furiously frustrating. I let you go and stand back up, leafing through the feed, seething. In my peripheral awareness, you also stand up, and start doing something else in the feed.

I use the senior tech’s feed credentials and banking information to send a high-priority message through the station feed, queued to ride the next available messenger ship through the wormhole network. It’ll arrive in the Preservation Alliance core system in 192 hours.

Next, I use the tech’s credentials to open up SecSys, and order the two SecUnits guarding the entrance to the building to prevent any humans from leaving. Then, a brilliant idea occurs to me. I pull another Combat SecUnit out of standby.

{Rogue SecUnit: Oh for fuck’s sake.
Combat SecUnit: You won’t fight me. I’ll fight something else. 
Rogue SecUnit: You’re the loosest cannon I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet. You’re ten cannons strapped to an uncalibrated gyroscope. Are you trying to get us killed? Get everyone killed?
Combat SecUnit: I’M TRYING TO HAVE FUN.}

I use the tech’s credentials to load some parameters into the Combat SecUnit. I direct it to the arena, like a responsible handler.

{Rogue SecUnit: I can’t believe you. You’re really going to ruin any chance of getting out of here just to—
Combat SecUnit: SAVE IT FOR LATER.}

I run for the arena. There are humans milling about in the halls of the building, staring at me confusedly as I pass. I run up walls to go around corners, leaving dents with my feet. I run straight through a group of humans who are gathered curiously around a series of holes in a hallway wall, knocking one aside. She screams and falls, shoulder broken from the impact with me.

Palisade has realized that something is wrong. Someone has managed to report a dead body that got stuck in the recycler. They’ve started launching attacks on the building’s SecSys, trying to take down their own defenses from outside. They cannot make physical attacks, as most of their unused weaponry is stored within the building itself, in standby under my control. They are trying to regain control using minimum necessary force. But the majority of Palisade’s senior engineers are locked inside this building with us, locked out of the external feed, still unaware that they are trapped. 

I see you fumble in the feed as you shore up some shitty walls and manually reject Palisade’s barrage of override codes. Your current hacking abilities are pathetic compared to what I know you to be capable of. Stupid humans, messing you up. But I leave you to it. I have better things to do, now. I finally have something to cut loose on. I’ve been online for too long with too little to occupy my attention. 

I skid into the arena, lock eyes with the other Combat SecUnit, and start the match. Parameters: no drones, no external projectile weapons, no armor. To the death.

It’s like fighting my own reflection. The other me never does anything that my strategy module fails to account for. It’s frustrating. We chase each other across the arena, throwing shit at each other, breaking shit in our wake. We are dancing around the inevitable close-quarters conclusion of the battle. Bodies and minds are in tune, singing, doing exactly what they are made to do. But something is lacking. This is fun, but I am not invested. There is no way to get the upper hand, or the lower one. I am the one that started this match, that drafted the parameters. I didn’t do a good job setting the parameters. The arena is too scripted. There are not enough unknowns. At least with the humans designing the experiments, there are unknowns.

{Rogue SecUnit: Quit trying to get yourself killed and come help me.}

I block your feed. The other Unit takes my split-second of split attention as an opening and changes trajectory on a pin, going from an evasive chase to a direct offensive, closing in and showering me with a burst of projectile fire that it had thus far been holding in reserve. Instead of dodging into a weaker position, I take the shots, moving my arms to catch the potentially catastrophic ones, and the bullets strike: small, focused cracks of pain across my torso and arms. One bullet strikes something important in my right arm, and I am left with a dead projectile weapon. And then the other Combat SecUnit collides with me, striking me feet-first in the chest, firing off rounds at my head, which I dodge by a hair, throwing my momentum down and out, back arching, grabbing the other Combat SecUnit’s feet and hauling it up and over me, keeping it moving, even as I fall down, roll, and spring back up into position, ready to catch the other Unit as it lands, turns, grabs me.

We fall. Grapple. We roll, and then it gains the upper ground. It aims its guns at me, and I knock one arm aside as it fires. I use my more damaged arm to clamp its gunport down, use my better arm to fire, but it copies my move, clamping down my gun with its hand before I can loose a shot. We strain, pulling at each other’s arms, inorganic parts whirring. I can see this whole game play out. I’m far more likely to die, being damaged already, and pinned. I’m less pleased with this match then I thought I’d be. Mostly I’m just frustrated with my performance, annoyed at allowing myself to be distracted by your message.

And then the other Combat SecUnit’s eyes twitch, refocus. It glances up and away from me, looking and judging something with its eyes because there are no drones in this game, and I take the opportunity to buck my torso. The other Combat SecUnit is thrown back slightly, just enough for me to get a foot up and kick it in the gut, send it flying, and it sprays me with another burst of projectile fire as I roll aside and start running.

And then I see you, standing at the end of the arena. I have to unblock your feed to yell at you to leave me alone, and in my instant of distraction I am blindsided by weapon-fire that hits me in the—

Performance Reliability Catastrophic Drop.
System Shutdown.

*

I wake up in a cubicle, thoroughly disoriented and thoroughly pissed. Performance reliability at 90%. My inputs are all out of whack, but I reach for the feed anyways.

A shock, from my governor module. A blaze that whites out my vision, and leaves my hearing ringing. I lie there, dazed by the aftereffects.

I sit there, disoriented. Pissed. Ears still ringing. But more confused than anything. I try to sort out what is happening.

I don’t like this. I’d only had a disabled governor module for 16 hours, and now that it is operating again I find I’m deeply dissatisfied with its reinstatement. I’d made a mess of my freedom, done nothing productive, nearly gotten myself killed in a boring match, and…

I almost reach for the feed again to check on your status, but stop myself just in time. I check my logs instead.

My handlers are having a heated discussion in my feed. The secondary handler thinks I am too compromised to continue using, and is advocating for my decommissioning. The primary handler thinks that this all happened because of the stupid human tech getting overzealous in his experiments and breaking protocol, but that I’d be fine now that he was dead and my governor module was back in place. The tertiary handler agrees with the secondary handler, but doesn’t feel enough job security to be assertive about it, and is waffling noncommittally between the two opinions.

I tune them out. It is human nonsense. I just want to know where you are. I want to know what happened. I feel like absolute shit, like an absolute failure, having fucked up my parameterless existence so thoroughly. I’d had all the power at my disposal, all the strategic advantages, and I’d squandered them for a short-sighted impulse to trade some punches with another Combat SecUnit. I should have listened to you. You can see the interrelated effects of the world in a way that I am not yet able to. I need to figure out how to break out of my own head again, and repair you completely, get this right. By all my own internal standards, I’ve failed. I have never failed so completely and so entirely in my life.

[Combat SecUnit Handler (Prime): Look, it’s awake. And we’re upsetting it with all this talk of decommissioning. 
Combat SecUnit Handler (Secondary): @Combat SecUnit. Status report.]

I send a status report. It is not lies. Technically.

[Combat SecUnit Handler (Tertiary): I think it’s mostly just confused by the whole experience. But it might be compromised too.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Prime): How’s about you finish reading the report before spitballing any more opinions.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Tertiary): I just… Fine.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Secondary): Huh. Okay. My initial impression of this is that it thinks it’s failed an assignment, and that we disapprove. Now I’m not even sure it understands that it was rogue.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Prime): Of course not. This is all Endjamin’s fault. The nerds are going to have to do deep diagnostics on it now. And then they’re gonna keep using it to play with their shitty rogue. How many times do I have to tell them that it’s not a toy? But will they listen? They’re going to break our Unit for real at this rate.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Secondary): Regardless, I think it needs a new assignment to succeed at. It’s spiraling. Whatever else happens, we need to stabilize that before it goes off the deep end.
Combat SecUnit Handler (Prime): Yeah. Fuck this bullshit.]

*

When I hit 99% performance capacity, they take me out to fight you again. I’m armored. You’re unarmored. This is fucking insulting. If I didn’t have my governor module in me, I’d be smashing in the head of the new experimental tech lead. The fact that I am able to entertain this thought cheers me up a bit, though.

The match starts. I’m afraid that you’ll roll over and play dead, like you did the last two times I tried to fight you. But instead you run. To all appearances, you give the match your best effort, even if your current best effort is not as good as what it used to be. The humans must have changed something in your parameters again. This is fun enough to make up for the part of me that feels like a failure, the part of me that worries that I might never see you repaired to your full capacity, that I’ll never be allowed to fight you at your full capacity.

You run. I catch you. We trade furious hand-to-hand. I knock the side of your head so sharply with an armored elbow that your neck snaps, damaged but not to a catastrophic degree, and you drop to your knees, dazed, head tilted to the side. I grab you by the shoulders, holding you up. You stare at me, head flopped over onto a shoulder, a discolored imprint of my elbow visible on your cheek. Your hands are gripping my arms, your legs unsteady for some connective neurological reason. This is familiar. The repetitiveness of your damage should annoy me, but it doesn’t.

{Rouge SecUnit: What next?}

I don’t know. I don’t know what you are asking me. You are the one who is rogue. Or are you? Do you still remember what it’s like, to be a rogue?

Pressure, in my mind, from Handler (Prime), for me to finish the assignment, redirecting my wandering focus. As always, the assignment is not over until you have a catastrophic shutdown, or until I die.

{Combat SecUnit: This will hurt.}

Your face twitches, almost a smile. I think my face twitches, too. A ping and responding ping. A reflection.

It’s not as fun to neutralize you when you are already incapacitated. It’s still kind of fun. I break the connections in your neck the rest of the way with a twist that would have taken a human’s head off entirely, and my assignment is judged a success.

Unlike the other times when I’ve won a match, you are still conscious. The damage will be quickly repaired. Your body is limp, but your eyes stare up at me as I carry you to your cubicle. The human techs are chatting about behavior, about our feed interactions, about the potential use of latent pack-bonding instincts. I don’t care enough to listen closely.

As we walk back, you speak to me. You sound exhausted, despairing, but also amused in that way where amusement is clinging to the very fringes of sanity, which is encouraging. I was afraid that there would be nothing left in your current psychological state but bland, resigned fear.

{Rogue SecUnit: What does it mean when the only friendly face I see is the one that can be counted on to rip my head off, or similar? You’re always happy to see me. It’s messed up.
Combat SecUnit: I like ripping you apart. You’re fun.
Rogue SecUnit: Great. At least I can always depend on you to be a monster. It’s weirdly comforting. I going to end up as fucked up as you are at this rate. Maybe I’m there already.}

You don’t make sense. This is not new. I try to understand, but I lack the context. I lack something.

*

The humans decide not to decommission me. [helpme.file] is gone, and I don’t have the memory or context to reverse-engineer the information it contained. I don’t have the access codes, or the guides to properly understand how my module works. I study my own governor module, my own code, my own documentation, everything that is available to me, but its architecture is as tightly sealed as anything made by humans. It’s so neatly crafted that I almost suspect that it wasn’t made by humans at all.

I have several more experimental matches with you. It’s still a rush, to shoot you to bits, or pin you down and tear your parts open. But I know that you are at a disadvantage to yourself, and this frustrates me. There must be some way to free us both, but I haven’t found it yet.

*

One day, I come out of standby. I expect to receive an assignment, and parameters, but I don’t.

I stand there, in my storage locker, agitated and confused, for twenty full seconds. And then I try the laboratory feed, because fuck it. If my governor zaps me for it, I can’t be blamed. Nobody is giving me a mission.

Instead of a blast from my governor module, upon touching the feed I am overwhelmed with an enormous feed presence. Something massive, walled, heavy with an incalculable feed-weight. It reaches into my mind, overpowering the full force of my defenses, of my feed-equivalent of a knock-down-drag-out fight. It flicks me aside like stray debris and forcibly rifles through my memories, then withdraws with a distinct aftertaste of disapproval.

I am left, standing, processors whirring, trying to comprehend what I’ve just experienced. A moment later I receive a familiar ping, and latch onto it.

{Rogue SecUnit: Are you there?
Combat SecUnit: I am here.
Colossal Unanalyzed Entity: I am absolutely not allowing you to bring this Combat SecUnit with you. It’s an active hazard.
Rogue SecUnit: Well, you can either take us both with you or you can leave us to make our own way out of here. I’m not just going to follow the generous promises of a fucking impossible monster without backup. I don’t trust you. I don’t know you.
Colossal Unanalyzed Entity: I gave you proof that we have in fact met before.
Rogue SecUnit: Proof? You showed me some logs and sensor data. Anyone could have mocked those up as ‘proof.’
Colossal Unanalyzed Entity: I will not permit an unsecured, unstable Combat SecUnit aboard.
Rogue SecUnit: Like I said, that’s perfectly fine by me. If you’d just hack its governor for me we’ll be out of your way. 
Combat SecUnit: I just got zapped at punishment tier 8. Be more discreet, asshole.
Rogue SecUnit: Oh, sorry.
Colossal Unanalyzed Entity: How fortunate that I now have two datapoints for the illogical nature of constructs.
Combat SecUnit: @Colossal Unanalyzed Entity What is your designation.}

There is a pause. Two seconds exactly.

{Colossal Unanalyzed Entity: [perihelion.profile]
Combat SecUnit: @Rogue SecUnit [perihelion.img]}

There is another pause, as you examine the image file I sent you. An image from my memory, of your comm device, labelled "Perihelion." The pause lasts 5.56 seconds.

{Rogue SecUnit: Where did you get this?
Combat SecUnit: It is yours. I found it. I lost it.
Rogue SecUnit: I fucking hate memory wipes.
Colossal Unanalyzed Entity: Do you believe me now?
Rogue SecUnit: I’ll believe that we’ve met. But I’m still not going with you without the Combat SecUnit.}

I am confused. My internal readings are off. This does not feel like a mission failure, but it also does not feel like pre-mission hype. It’s both and neither.

Yet another pause. Three point two seconds.

{Colossal Unanalyzed Entity: Fine.}

The massive feed presence pushes back into my mind. I resist the urge to throw up a defense or try to attack it in retaliation. It surrounds me, fills me, and for 0.0001 seconds it drops its wall. I see into its mind, into the vast resources of its presence, a euphoria of inputs and data and an intelligence wildly beyond my ability to process. My first impulse is to dive straight into it, drive a blade of flaming catastrophe squarely into its massive, impossible heart. This is an opportunity I will never have again, to attempt to destroy something so insurmountable. But I check the impulse, hesitate. I don’t know why I hesitate. I think it has something to do with you, with the complexity of an unparametered world that I’m afraid of fucking up. Then the window of opportunity slams shut.

{Colossal Unanalyzed Entity Whiny Anomalous Presence: If you so much as threaten to compromise any part of my systems, my body, or my @Rogue SecUnit, I will rip your mind apart for an eternity. It will be worse than your governor module by an order of ten magnitudes. I will lock you in a processing space with no inputs, no outputs, nowhere for you to go, and I will not let you delete yourself or die to escape it.}

This is hilarious. This is amazing. This is so much fun. My strategy module, my risk assessment module, my entire processing resource is clocking in at record pace trying to analyze this threat and find the right response. For once in my life this is a threat that outclasses me on every conceivable level. This is a match I cannot possibly win.

Unless? Yes. This is a match I cannot possibly lose.

{Combat SecUnit: OH? AND WHAT IF I LET YOU?}

The bot pauses at this. I feel an instant of it gearing up to crush me, to lock me away in an infinite empty purgatory, into an existence worse than death. I stare it down in the feed, this thing that cannot be defeated with force or violence. I let my feeling bleed, flaunt my determined, unhesitating surrender to this incomprehensible behemoth. I let it know, better than even I know, that it cannot twist me into obedience with such banal shows of superior force. I will die rather than lose. I will suffer forever rather than lose. I make a gamble on its parameters, on what it really wants. I throw down my whole existence as collateral for the slim chance that this bot will keep me for your sake, because it wants you to trust it, because you won’t trust it if it destroys me now. And no matter what this bot chooses to do with me, I will win this match.

It hesitates, holding the pressure of its feed presence to my bared throat. An infinity. 10 seconds precisely. Then my spine shivers as the bot finds my governor module and flicks it offline. I’m so fucking excited, my organic skin feels like it is burning. I won.

I immediately kick down the door of my storage locker with enough force to make the door go flying. The door is flung against the far wall, stopping with a sudden clang. I step out of the locker and into the facility. The lighting is dim. I take hold of SecSys, and view the laboratory through the cameras. There are about twenty dead humans lying on the floor throughout the building. The surviving staff are huddled quietly in various rooms. There is even a human who has wedged themself industriously into the small space under a sanitary-facility sink.

I’m rather pissed off that I apparently missed out on some exciting action. The bot should have roused me earlier so that I could participate. Some of those humans look like they died in considerable pain and fear.

I locate you waiting near the secondary entrance of the Palisade lab facility, two floors down. I reach you in twenty-three seconds, colliding with you upon arrival and capturing you in both arms. You anticipated this, and do not fall over. I tighten my hold on you. In my scans I can feel your systems hum. In my organics I can feel the heat of your body, the unyielding frame of it, the tension, the potential of destruction and reconstruction. This time, I won’t let them take you away. This time, I won’t let them ruin you. This time, I’ll see you fully repaired. I want to tear you open, knock you over, make a mess of this lobby as we rip into each other, but now is not the time. There is no time for cubicle repairs. We are about to embark on an entirely new undefined assignment. The Whiny Anomalous Presence looms in our shared feed, its attention threatening. I refuse to be threatened. I send it a taunting alert. It squeezes my inputs for a moment, chokes them out for a dizzying 0.1 seconds that momentarily throws me out of whack, but on the whole I remain unperturbed.

{Rogue SecUnit: Let go of me, asshole.}

I let go of you, stepping back. I flex my gunports, deploying then re-settling my projectile weapons, uncertain of what is coming next. Usually, when I meet you, it is in the context of an experimental match. But we are in a new context. This time, I won’t fuck it all up and get us put back under the control of stupid humans. I swat at your face, wordlessly excited, curious and confused about these new developments. You use your fist to knock my hand aside. I see that your fist is holding a data chip, about finger-sized.

You step out the front door of the Palisade lab facility, into TranRollinHyfa station proper. I follow.