Work Text:
Adya doesn’t read the message immediately.
She's the first one up. Her team is exhausted and still recovering, but they're safe. And SecUnit is safe and whole, and she's going to make sure no one ever gets the chance to hurt it again.
Her tablet is on the desk, but she can see the station time on a matte display across the room. She takes an extra five minutes to lie in bed.
Why wouldn’t she? Her team is safe.
The survey team suite consists of five bedrooms around a shared living/workspace. Most of the team were sharing rooms. They had cleared a bed next to Ratthi's for SecUnit.
Constructs don't need to sleep, but it deserved at least a bed to call its own. It deserves more than that, but that would have to wait until they were outside the awful Corporation Rim.
She'd spoken to SecUnit last night. It had seemed overwhelmed and confused but interested in Preservation. She would make sure it had all the time it needed to figure out what it wanted to do.
SecUnit’s not in the central room when she enters. She thinks it must be resting in the room with Ratthi. She pours herself a glass of water, grabs one of the snack packs of nuts and heads to her desk.
There's a message packet on her feed, or more accurately there are approximately 52 messages all labelled with variations of ATTENTION REQUIRED. She's been getting these from the moment they got back to PortFreeCommerce. Half of them are crap but the other half are actually important.
One message stands out. It’s unlabeled, no subject line and addressed only to her. It contains one file ‘goodbye.txt’ sent from SecUnit. Odd. She starts reading. It seems to be SecUnit’s journal. She hopes it realises that it doesn’t need to send her this.
I didn’t know you write she sends after a moment. It’s very well written
The message bounces back with an error message. Address Unreachable/Out of range.
She continues reading. She doesn’t know if she should tell SecUnit how competent and calm it looked dealing with Bharadwaj and Volescu. She tries the original message again instead and gets the same error.
She considers pinging Ratthi to check if they’re up and chatting, but would SecUnit find that rude?
In the notes, SecUnit is at the survey habitat, freezing and in pain. She remembers she talked to it next. How the blood and armour looked strewn around the floor, the pain and annoyance in SecUnit's face when she spoke to it.
It calls itself horrifying, and her worry gets ahead of her. She crosses the main suite and knocks on Ratthi and SecUnit's door. The door swings inwards slowly, and she can see Ratthi's sleeping form on one of the beds. She tries not to disturb him. There's no sign of SecUnit.
Hopefully it .. what? Went down to get a hotel breakfast? Wandered off to get a look at PortFreeCommerce and gotten taken? SecUnit may not have had much experience with human society, but it was smart and wouldn't have wandered into danger. Would it?
She takes a deep breath, refills her glass of water and sits back down at her desk. Willing her knees to stop shaking she opens the file again.
goodbye.txt. It wouldn't have left would it? It had seemed interested in Preservation and ... and she hadn’t given an option of anywhere else to go.
She's skimming through the file as fast as possible, and she really shouldn't, and there's something horrific every second page, but if something's happened to SecUnit she needs answers now.
She sends Ratthi a tagged message for when he wakes up. On a second thought, she sends an urgent one to Pin-Lee as well.
Pin-Lee knocks on her door a few minutes later. Her hair tied up and still in her pyjamas. "I haven't seen SecUnit since last night." She says. "What was in the file?"
"It's journal," Adya responds, brow creased. "It's long. I don't know if it left a proper message in it. You didn't get a copy sent to you?"
"No.” Pin-Lee sighs. “There’s not anything specific at the end?”
Adya presses her hand into her face. She was being so silly. Why hadn't she checked that earlier? She scrolls to the end of the document, reads the last few paragraphs and
Oh.
Shit.
She'd fucked up and hadn't treated it like a proper person and hadn't seen that it wasn't comfortable and damm all the solicitors she has to meet with, she should have made sure it was okay, properly actually okay.
Adya forces herself to take a breath. "Pin-Lee," she says. "Can you check how many cargo transports would have left the port last night?"
There are too many transports. She should have known that from SecUnit's message. Besides what was she going to do? Find it and forcefully take it back to Preservation, prove she was as bad as it thought?
She hadn't worked with many high-level bots, and she probably shouldn't even think of SecUnit that way, but she's worried that it would be so easy for it to get caught. Her mind wanders to her oldest daughter's accusations of being overprotective. There's no one else to help SecUnit. How could she have known?
She should have known. She shouldn’t have just assumed that SecUnit knew it would have choices, proper choices on Preservation. She shouldn’t have just assumed it would be happy at her home.
Guardian is a nicer word than owner.
She can see why it wouldn’t trust her.
And no, she has a job to do. She can't wallow in self-pity over messing this up. GrayCris still needs to be brought to justice: the families of the DeltFall victims still deserve that. Her team still needs her to make sure they stay on track. And Preservation needs her to keep doing her job.
She closes the file and starts on the remaining 43 corporate emails she needs to deal with.
"I think it's being an asshole," Pin-Lee says. "It could have just told one of us that it was uncomfortable or given us another day to talk to us or another way to reach it."
She'd had a glass of wine at dinner and always tended to deal with worry through mild annoyance.
Bharadwaj smiles at her. "I think you're just still annoyed about the crush thing."
Adya had sent the file to the rest of her team, under strict instructions to not share it further. She hopes SecUnit wouldn’t have minded. It’s been a few days but she still hasn't read it properly herself.
Pin-Lee makes a face and turns to Adya. "I think your work is amazing and you're very attractive, but no."
"If anything," Bharadwaj laughs, "Pin-Lee would have a crush on your leadership skills."
"I'll drink to that!" Pin-Lee says. "To our intrepid galactic explorer."
They've all read parts of it now. She's had to have a few private talks over what it said. She's had to take time to consider how much they - she - screwed up and it's easier to do this, Adya thinks, to remember that SecUnit did like them, care about them. That it had a good sense of humour even if it kept it hidden. That it's hopefully out there watching Sanctuary Moon and free. It's kinder than to think about all the things it's endured and all the ways it could get caught.