Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There were only seventy-six hours left on my rental contract when the mine collapsed.

(Not the whole mine. Not even most of the mine. But a pretty substantial 17% of the tunnel structure gave out with very little warning.)

I wasn't there when it happened. I had been stationed in the mess, monitoring the second meal rotation to ensure that no fights broke out. I had identified a pair of clients who were starting to display signs of becoming combatants at a table to the far end of the room and had begun to relocate over there (shuffling slowly to avoid spooking anyone) when the emergency notification came over the feed and everyone stopped everything. As shocked silence became rattled murmurs, I pinged the other SecUnits. Responses came immediately, and all at once: onetwothreefourfive.

I've heard humans refer to their "stomachs sinking," and I think I was experiencing something similar. I pinged again, and again I got five answers, scattered strategically around the complex. We were one short.

I tapped HubSystem for a report. I was the farthest from the scene here, and it would be ill-advised to leave my clients with no security (Especially now. The shock would only last so long before it became agitation, and it would be extremely easy for that to tip over into dangerous territory.), but I hated to stand here doing nothing. I submitted a request anyway, petitioning for permission to go to the mines and help look for survivors. The denial came almost as soon as I sent the request. Not that I expected a different response, but I still hated it. 

A supervisor tapped our shared channel. Sound off.

Again, all six of us pinged as one. The supervisor tapped the SecUnit closest to the mine entrance.

SecUnit 4, go. Coordinate with the SafetyResponders. 

It sent her an acknowledgement. Before I closed out of the feed, one of the other units sent a datapacket in the general channel, tagged specifically for SecUnit 4. I took it too, and peeked inside. It was a download from HubSystem's knowledge base, a safety briefing about mine collapses. The unit had highlighted a subsection about the potential dangers of aftershocks. SecUnit 4 sent that unit the same acknowledgement code it had given the supervisor.

That was that, then. At least a SecUnit was going to be present in the aftermath, even if it wasn't me. That was fine. It was a relief, even. If the datapacket about mine collapses was accurate (I had no logged prior experience to either verify or debunk it), a recently-collapsed mineshaft was the last place I wanted to be. SecUnit 4 would handle pulling bodies out of the rubble, and I could get back to standing here in the mess like a piece of furniture.

I registered a disturbance across the room, near where I had initially been standing. One of the humans had started crying. Another stood up beside him and started yelling, insulting him for acting like the world was ending over something as stupid as a cave-in. I deleted the datapacket and strode across the room to disperse the handful of humans and augmented humans who had started to converge on the table, either to comfort the crying human or to argue with the yelling one. I told myself that I would rather be here, dealing with living clients instead of dead ones, but it was honestly a tossup between the two.

When the dust settled (literally) and the heads were counted (also literally, at least in most cases), the body count was logged at eight humans, three augmented humans, and one SecUnit.

This was not an optimal outcome (an optimal outcome would obviously be zero dead humans), but as I heard a supervisor point out, it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. The humans and augmented humans who had been in the mineshaft at the time were mostly new hires, younger and less experienced than the average remaining population. While loss of life and damage to equipment were never ideal, the worst result of the collapse was that a specialized digger bot was damaged badly enough to require ordering new parts from off-site.

(The SecUnit was inconvenient, as well, because the company charges for damages. But with our rotation nearly up, a new batch of fresh units was already in transit, so the facility was just going to eat the cost and they would be back up to the mandatory minimum number of active units in record time.)

SecUnit 4 had submitted its report via our shared feed, so the rest of us could take a look. It cut its visual recording to highlight the parts that were of the most interest to the human supervisor—the bodies, both living and dead, that it had helped dig out of the rubble. It included the full recording, though, and I played all ten and a half hours of it while I patrolled near the large equipment storage. I had some media that I'd downloaded from the entertainment feed, but there was a tension in the air that prevented me from relaxing and focusing on episode 23 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, even though normally it's surprisingly easy to lose myself while watching it. But instead I kept playing the recording back, watching through SecUnit 4's eyes as it ran scans and pinged employee implants and, when necessary, dug in the dirt with its armored hands to help pull someone out.

It's not my job to keep track of human productivity, so I couldn't tell you for sure whether things slowed down after the accident, but I don't think they did. In fact, if anything, I think that things picked up after management started pushing the remaining miners to fill in the gaps left by their dead coworkers. The overall mood at the installation was calm at a glance, but just in the cycle following the cave-in, I had to edit my patrol route four times to pass through areas where workers had stopped to try and have hushed conversations without being observed. My risk assessment module had been recalibrated just before I was shipped out here, and it was issuing a low-level warning at all times, with the probability of the workers organizing increasing marginally every time I broke up a clandestine meeting that didn't involve the humans present smushing their bodies together.

The thing was, I couldn't even blame them for being upset. Humans sometimes like each other. (I know, it confuses me too.) That some of them were unhappy about their fellow humans being killed (and then being forced to pick up the slack for the dead humans without any sort of transition period) seemed pretty reasonable to me. But it doesn't matter to SecSystem how reasonable the upset humans are, if the eventual product of their unhappiness is to take it out on management. I submitted a report to the security supervisor, indicating which humans I'd caught where and at what times, and performed individual assessments on each based on their employment records, with the two I thought most likely to cause trouble at the top. I didn't want to do it. My time here was nearly up, and as soon as I was packed back into my box and loaded onto the company ship it would abruptly stop mattering to me what these people did to each other. But I was here now, and while HubSystem had made it clear that I wasn't supposed to go and try to save any of the humans in the collapsed shaft, if I pretended not to notice the way that the miners were whispering when they thought they were alone, and then the humans did something insane like stage a revolt, it might occur to someone in the aftermath to scrutinize me and figure out why I'd failed to report.

The supervisor must have been on high alert for disturbances as well. Probably the other SecUnits had sent in similar reports to her already. It took several minutes after I submitted my report (humans take forever to analyze data, no matter how succinctly you lay it out for them), but she returned to me with an elaborative instruction: Obtain clear conversational audio.

She meant that in addition to spying and scaring her workers, I also had to eavesdrop. Technically that was something that I should already have been doing, but management at this installation was impressively cheap, and the cameras in the industrial areas weren't wired for sound like the ones in the living quarters were. I had run my lipreading code over some of the recordings, but that sort of thing is... fallible at best. (That, or the conspiratorial whispering really had been about purchasing a small species of fauna on the local black market. I might be inclined to believe that once, but four times from a collection of different humans seemed unlikely. (But hey, maybe these fauna were just really really cute, or delicious, or whatever.)) 

I didn't want to do it, but it was a task I could focus on while I was wandering aimlessly around the designated work areas. It also gave me some freedom to edit my own patrol route as needed, without anyone questioning it. I could extend my path to cross through some areas where I knew the camera coverage was spotty, and take a small amount of enjoyment from the slight change in scenery. It sucked that I found a pair of workers hiding behind some storage crates almost immediately.

Even in my armor, I move pretty quietly. (Constructs are meant to be seen, but hearing us marching around all the time would annoy management, I guess.) So I was able to get close with the crates shielding me from view, and record the hushed conversation.

It was... not what I expected.

Human One: "You're full of shit."
Human Two: "No, listen, I swear I'm not lying!"
Human One: "I don't think you're lying, I think you're stupid."
Human Two: [Sound of an open palm slapping lightly on bare flesh; Human Two likely grabbed Human One's forearm.] "I know what I saw!"

(It didn't sound like a fight was incipient, so I dismissed the suggestion from HubSystem that I reveal myself to break the engagement up. I didn't know what they were talking about, but it sounded like it might qualify as task-relevant.)

Human One: "Alright, fine. What do you think you saw?"
Human Two: "I saw Emil! Clear as crystal!"

(I ran a check against the employee registry, wondering what Human Two had seen Emil doing that had freaked them out so badly.)

Human One: "...Look, I know it's hard now, but—"
Human Two: "No, listen!"

(Emil was listed as one of the miners who had been brought in recently. I scanned his file hastily, checking to see whether anyone had already tagged him for behavioral anomalies. And there was one, right at the bottom of the report.)

Human Two: "He was just standing there. Watching me."
Human One: "Man—"
Human Two: "His whole face was bashed in."

(Emil was one of the augmented humans who had died in the cave-in.)

Both humans fell silent for 47.2 seconds, during which time I reopened SecUnit 4's edited recording, the one that highlighted just the body retrievals. Freezing frames to apply a body scan, I found what was left of Emil pretty quickly. Human Two was right, his face was pretty well pulverized. It was so bad, in fact, that I found it doubtful that Human Two would have been able to identify Emil on sight alone without the body scan. (Also, Human Two was almost certainly wrong about Emil watching them. I'll leave out the goriest details but just trust me when I say that even if he hadn't already been fed to the recycler, Emil would definitely be incapable of watching anyone. (Also, that's right, Emil had already been recycled.)) Then Human One broke the pause, softly enough that I had to tune up my hearing.

Human One: "...You know, when I first got here, years ago, something like this happened then, too."
Human Two: "It did?"
Human One: "Yeah. Another cave-in. They don't check the support struts that well. You've seen."
[Beat, during which Human Two presumably offered some sort of nonverbal reply.]
Human One: "The ceiling came down hard. I was there, and a digger got knocked down on top of me. I've still got the scar from it, under my hair thank the deity. If the digger hadn't fallen on me, a bigass rock would have and I wouldn't be standing here right now."
Human Two: "...Was it really bad?"
Human One: "I was the only survivor, man."

(I ran a check on previous cave-ins at this installation, to verify Human One's story.)

Human One: "They pulled me out, but they couldn't even find the other bodies. I was down there with six others, and the rubble was so deep they couldn't find them."
Human Two: "They couldn't? At all?"
Human One: "Well. Not at first."

(I had the accident report listings up in my feed, but I put them aside. It was dumb of me, but I was sort of fascinated by Human One's story.)

Human One: "We were trying to hit a quota, so we didn't dig the whole shaft out right away. We were too pressed for time. It was weeks later we finally went back and cleared everything out."
Human Two: "Did you find them?"
Human One: "Oh, we found 'em alright."

(I suddenly wondered if I actually wanted to hear where this was going. It was clear at this point that it wasn't relevant to my current task. I could have made my presence clear to break the conversation up, or even just walked away and continued on my patrol route. But I was rooted to the spot, like my armor had locked up. I couldn't move at all.)

Human One: "We found all six of 'em. Three were still alive, even."
Human Two: "...They were?"
Human One: "Yeah, but they were fucked up. See, they were trapped in that collapsed shaft, behind a wall of rubble, for weeks and weeks. No light, no food, hardly any air."
Human Two: "So how were they still alive?"

(Human One paused. I turned up my hearing until I could make out both of their breathing. It was slightly ragged, marked by anxiety. HubSystem flagged them again for potentially needing intervention, and again I dismissed it. I needed to hear this part.)

Human One: "...They were fucked up. They'd started out screaming for help, right? They screamed until they couldn't talk anymore, they damaged their vocal chords so bad. Then they'd tried to dig themselves out with their bare hands. Tore all their fingernails off, wore the tips of their fingers down to the bone. Then, I dunno what the order of events was, exactly. Maybe a fight broke out first, or maybe they got hungry first. But they killed each other. The one guy, the youngest in the group, company figures they killed him first cause of how little of him was left. Just bones and bits of his uniform."
Human Two: "...They..."
Human One: "They ate him. Down to the fucking bones. And then they killed two more and ate them too, but there were still pieces of those two left when we dug 'em out."
Human Two: "What about the three who were alive? What did you do?"
Human One: "They were crazy, man. The light made 'em nuts—even more nuts than they already were—and they charged the rescue team. Just making these raspy snarling noises, cause they couldn't talk anymore. The SecUnit with us put 'em down, cold as a sonuvabitch. Took way more bullets than any normal person should. Why'd you think they sent one to this cave-in? Wasn't cause they're better than a SafetyResponder bot. It was cause management remembers the last time."

(My organic parts were clammy with sweat. My threat assessment module was registering low numbers, under 20% chance of nearby danger, but I thought longingly of the big projectile weapons stored in the ready room lockers.)

Human Two: "...Is all that true?"

There was a long pause, nearly five full seconds. Then Human One burst out into deep, guffawing laughter that made me jump. Human Two squeaked.

Human One: "Of course it's not true, you idiot!"
Human Two: "That's not funny!"
Human One: "Yeah, it is. You're so gullible. There's no such thing as cannibals inside Rimspace, just like there's no such thing as ghosts anywhere."

Rapid footsteps as Human Two stormed off. Human One called a few more insults after them, then also left in a different direction. I stayed put, waiting for my circulatory system to purge the unexpected (unwanted, unnecessary) adrenaline from my veins before I tried to move. This had been a pointless waste of several minutes, during which time I should have been searching for workers who were violating code by having actual discussions about responding to the cave-in, not just telling scary stories about it.

I scrapped the report template I'd opened when I'd first started recording the conversation. Then I remembered that I'd opened the accident report listings and skimmed them. There were a few cave-ins logged within the last ten years, some with casualties and some without. There were none that fit the description that Human One had given, with the number of bodies listed at six. (There wouldn't have been anything in those reports about a SecUnit having to execute workers for being insane cannibals. That would go in a separate folder, for necessary expenditure of human resources.) There was one report that caught my attention, though. It was dated five years ago, and the cause of the collapse was determined to be inadequate structural support (read: badly designed and/or poorly maintained struts). But it wasn't quite right, because the number of bodies wasn't listed at six.

It was seven. No survivors.

I knew what cannibals were. (Through context clues. The word wasn't actually new to me but I'd never bothered to search it before, because when I heard clients use it it didn't set off any keyword alarms.) But the other word that Human One had used, "ghost," wasn't in my lexicon. I'd tried searching it on HubSystem's knowledge base first, but came up blank. Evidently it wasn't the sort of thing that was relevant to anyone in the installation, and so had been cut out to save space. (Other words that seemed to have gotten this treatment when I'd gotten bored and gone looking: "hemolysis," "trigraph," "zeitgeist,"  "acronym.") Weirdly, though, I did get a hit when I searched my media storage.

I hadn't gone through every serial I'd downloaded yet, because I was sort of fixated on Sanctuary Moon, but I got two hits on the word. The first was actually Sanctuary Moon itself, in a synopsis for an episode a few seasons along from where I was. Something about the colony solicitor's bodyguard returning as a ghost to offer the colony solicitor advice. (When I figured out what a ghost was, I tagged the memory of that episode's synopsis to delete later. That was a spoiler I didn't want to know about.) The second was the premise of a show I hadn't looked at yet. I tagged it for later and when I finished my patrol route and had taken my place standing guard in the mess during last meal rotation of the cycle, I queued it up. The concept was, roughly, that a group of humans went out to a station that had been abandoned years earlier, to investigate whether the original inhabitants had left anything worth salvaging behind. (It was a little more complicated than that; one of the humans later turned out to have orchestrated the entire mission because ter brother had died there during the incident that led to the station being abandoned, but that's not really relevant.) While they were exploring, the humans had started to vanish one by one. It was eventually revealed that the culprits were ghosts, which are apparently dead humans who are somehow still around and kicking and posing a serious physical threat to living humans in spite of also sometimes being incorporeal. The series was short, only seven episodes, and I watched it until the end, when the main protagonist was able to repair the sabotaged ship and escape, leaving behind all the ghosts of her dead teammates as they turned on the one who brought them there. 

It was, in a word, stupid. If ghosts were real, they would be registered as an extreme threat to clients, and the company would have given me a module on how to kill them. Whatever Human Two had seen standing and staring at them in the collapsed shaft, there was no way it was a dead human.

But it might still be an as-yet unknown threat.

I was scheduled to patrol the living quarters while most of the humans slept, but after the first meal rotation the next cycle, I was set to make one last check of the mines before the company ship with the fresh units arrived and I was packed up and taken back to the deployment center. I still had the instruction to seek out and record illegal exchanges, so I still had that cover in order to get away with modifying my patrol route slightly and entering the range of the collapsed shaft.

Mines generally look about the same no matter where you are. They're full of the same equipment, the same miserable humans, and the same bored SecUnits. Even the general layouts of the tunnels wind up being fairly similar, with the major differences being how deep things have been dug out and what color the rocks are. Mines suck, and I have no idea how I managed to handle standing around in them all cycle before I cracked my governor module and started downloading media.

The on-duty workers weren't actually anywhere near the shaft right now. After the bodies had been recovered, most of the work had been refocused back to the safe areas ("safe" being both a relative term and an ironic assumption) because I guess there was nothing in the collapsed shaft worth bringing the diggers in for right now. That, plus the fact that the only camera that had been set up in this area was recycler scrap now, made it an ideal place for workers to have whispered meetings that the supervisor would want me to record and break up.

HubSystem agreed with my analysis, so I didn't even have to hack it for permission. I could just go.

Leaving the range of the cameras was uncomfortable. Leaving the range of the working light rigs was worse. I had a light mounted in my armor, which should have made my low-light vision filters redundant, except that when I tried to activate the light nothing happened. The stupid cheap company always gave us stupid cheap equipment. I guess I should have been grateful that it was the light, and not the automatic fastenings that allowed my weapon ports to open, or something. (Not that I'd actually needed my weapons at all during this contract, but, well. The contract wasn't quite over yet.) I applied the vision filter before I turned the last corner into the collapsed portion of the shaft.

A pile of dirt and rocks took up approximately 73% of the entrance. That much was actually sort of a relief—to get into (or out of) the shaft, you had to scale the pile and squeeze through a gap near the top, which the SafetyResponders dug out just wide enough to be manageable. When I put my hands on the rocks, they shifted easily. Anything that tried to come out this way to attack the humans would have to fight its way to the top, and would make a ton of noise doing so. 

(Ghosts don't have to climb rock piles or squeeze through tiny holes. They can walk through solid objects. That was in the serial.)

(That was a stupid thought. Scratch that.)

SecUnits, particularly armored SecUnits, weigh more than a human with similar body proportions. But SecUnit 4 had managed the gap, several times, while dragging injured and dead humans. The smaller rocks tumbled away under my hands and feet, but the whole pile was solid enough to support my weight as I climbed. At the top, my helmet scraped the ceiling as I shoved myself through. I realized too late that going headfirst meant I would have to get my entire body through before I could get my legs under me. The realization came as my hips cleared the gap and I overbalanced, tipping forward and sliding down the rocks to land flat on my stomach on the floor.

Real graceful, Murderbot. I was actually glad for a second that this shaft's camera had been destroyed, so I didn't have to watch myself do that.

I picked myself up and took a look around. Through the filter, everything was either green or washed-out, but there wasn't really anything much to look at. It was just like the rest of the mine—nothing in here but rocks and equipment. The rocks had collapsed everywhere and the equipment was just the broken frame of the digger sticking partially out from under another pile of debris, but still. Pretty much the same. I could have called it a cycle and left right then. It would have been the smart thing to do.

I moved further in. The other collapsed areas were mostly smaller, centered around support struts that had given out under the force of the initial vibration. (I didn't actually know what had triggered the collapse in the first place. Maybe the digger had hit some dirt that was looser than the rest and everything had gone to hell from there. I don't know, if I knew anything about mining I wouldn't be a SecUnit.) (Maybe I should have saved that datapacket about cave-ins.) There were some spots where I had to climb more dirt piles or squeeze under struts that had bent in like they were reaching down into the shaft blindly feeling around for something, but nothing as bad as the entrance had been.

It was maybe a minute in that I lost the cameras. I'd been keeping an eye on them, partly because I wanted to watch the entrance to make sure no one came down here to investigate where I'd gone, and partly because keeping at least a few camera inputs active in my feed is just normal and I didn't want to let go of them while I was in here. When they all winked out at once, with no staticky preamble to signal that I'd gone beyond the range of the local feed, it was like a door slamming shut behind me. I pinged SecSystem reflexively, as if it had suddenly forgotten and left me out in the cold and I could get my inputs back by reminding it that I was here. I got nothing in response. Not even an answering ping.

Well, that was just great. I wasn't that far from the nearest active feed relay, so there must have been something in the walls blocking me. What was this installation digging for? Maybe there was some sort of ore or mineral or whatever that ate electronic signals. Is lead a natural resource, or something that humans make themselves?

I couldn't look it up in HubSystem's knowledge base, because I was in here with no feed. Right.

I was about ten seconds from deciding to call it quits and go back to my designated patrol route when I heard something. I turned up my auditory input, and it disappeared. But when I reset my hearing to regular levels, it came back again. A sort of scratching sound, like when there are small pest fauna inside the walls of the temporary habitat, running around and chewing on wires that the habitat needs to keep things like the cubicles hooked in to the main power. But usually pest fauna are localized to one general area, and are easy to zero in on. This sound was in stereo, coming from both sides of the shaft, on either side of me. Also, pest fauna don't know to abruptly shut up when you turn up your hearing to try and find them.

The skin on my forearms, where the organic skin met the inorganic parts, prickled like a draft had somehow penetrated my armor. The temptation to open my gun ports was embarrassingly high, and I dismissed the urge. If there was any fauna in here large enough to be a hazard, I'd hear a lot more than gentle scratching before it came within range. I'd also have known about it before now; I may not pay attention to individual production schedules or target ores (or minerals, or whatever), but I didn't neglect the local hazard report. There was nothing living in these caves that anyone had bothered to put into my potential threat datapacket.

(Ghosts aren't living.)

(Shut up, Murderbot.)

Whatever was in this mineshaft with me, if it was anything at all, it wouldn't be able to hurt me. I had no reason not to investigate, except that I hated it in here and would much rather leave and finish my patrol and get locked in the transport box and shipped back to the company thirty-three cycles away before being shoved into my storage cubicle for who knew how long before I was taken out again. 

(Okay, so actually I was sort of split. I was between a box and a haunted place. Or, a pile of rocks and a claustrophobic space. Whichever of those sounds better.)

I'm not sure how long I stood around arguing with myself like a moron. Probably only about twenty seconds. My processors were new and my storage space wasn't packed with close to a thousand hours' worth of media, so I could have that sort of crisis even more efficiently than I can now. I had nearly decided to keep going, just to the end of the shaft, which according to the latest schematic was only a hundred or so feet in front of me, when the comm channel in my armor picked up static. It was faint, like it was traveling over a greater distance than simply from the main installation hub, and a significantly greater distance than between me and the end of the shaft. There was an asymmetrical pattern to the static, little bursts sort of like speech, but it was too faint and distant for me to pick up anything resembling words.

I turned up my hearing again. Just like the phantom pest fauna, the static disappeared when I tried to listen closer. When I lowered my hearing to normal, it came back, still in those pulsing not-quite-speech bursts. 

Something occurred to me. It was stupid, but no stupider than coming in here to make sure that no dead humans were hanging around had been. I turned my hearing down until I'd completely muted the audio input.

The scratching, pest fauna noise disappeared. But the static completely filled my head.

It was still completely unintelligible, with no audible voices layered within the white noise. And now that I could hear it properly, there were clearly no words at all. Each spike of static was identical, though they came in an irregular pattern. If someone was saying something underneath the static, they were saying the exact same monosyllable over and over. Bah, bah, bah, bah. No human language sounds like that.

So then maybe it wasn't a human language. I sent another ping, short-range and unspecific. Anything electronic in my immediate vicinity should catch it.

The static halted. Dead stop, in the middle of a bah. Then a return ping, garbled beyond proper recognition, echoed in my empty feedspace. The static resumed, faster and more insistent than before. Bah bah bah bah.

It occurred to me then that there was every likelihood that I was already in the transport box, hallucinating in hibernation. I didn't remember going back to the ready room for the techs to shut me off, but that didn't mean anything. A hallucination is a hallucination, and a hallucination made infinitely more sense than the location data I'd managed to scrape from the direction of the answering ping.

It had come from directly beneath my feet.

I looked down, like an idiot, expecting to be standing on a human skull or something. There was nothing but dirt under my boots. Dirt, and the static signal, which picked up even faster when I looked down, as if whatever was sending it had some way to see me and knew that I had directed my attention down there. Bahbahbahbah.

Whatever it was, it was decidedly not a human ghost. For some reason, that thought didn't comfort me at all. I'd been ignoring the way that my body was releasing adrenaline like it was anticipating a fight, but with all ambient noise muted it was impossible to ignore the way that my internal fluids were rushing in my head, or the fact that I had apparently stopped breathing at some point. (I don't need that much oxygen, so I figured I'd just keep holding my breath a little while longer.) 

I opened my media storage and pulled up the video that SecUnit 4 had submitted, the full 10.5 hour version. I didn't have 10.5 hours to stand around here like I was on guard duty in the mess, but I had already done the work for myself the previous cycle, when I'd saved frames of every humanoid-object that SecUnit 4 had seen and applied the body scan. SecUnit 4 hadn't personally dragged every body out of here, so it didn't have scans of all eleven humans. It also didn't have a scan of the dead SecUnit.

That didn't mean anything. SecUnit 4's priority wouldn't have been the SecUnit. It was a natural afterthought, just scrap like the digger. When it was hauled out by the SafetyResponder bots, SecUnit 4 wouldn't have had any reason to glance in its direction.

If it had been hauled out by the SafetyResponder bots. I didn't know for sure, hadn't bothered to verify that it had been found. If it had, it would have gone into the recycler even faster than the dead humans. I had no way of checking from here, trapped in the dark with no feed and nothing between me and whatever was signaling me than the dirt. The dirt was packed down by footprints, but had it been loose enough, before the rescue attempt, to have caved in under the SecUnit while it was in here? Had it been swallowed while the world ended around it, unable to do anything to protect the humans, or even itself?

If it was under there still, it couldn't possibly still be alive. The weight of all the dirt on top of it would have compacted the stupid cheap armor, squeezing it to death. If there was anything beneath my feet, it wasn't alive anymore.

(Can SecUnits become ghosts?)

I braced myself. Maybe what I was about to do would be the monumentally stupid cap on the mountain of stupid shit I'd done to get me standing here. But I wanted to know. I needed to know.

I pinged for SecUnits.

Immediate return, and not just one. I got five distinct pings, all coming from the walls around me, the ceiling above me. Clear and strong and—

Alive.

I pinged a second time, and got the same response. Onetwothreefourfive. I could judge signatures and distance. The other five units were all still stationed where they were supposed to be, and they probably all thought I was malfunctioning, to have ended up down here. I exhaled, letting out several minutes' worth of stale air.

I realized after a few seconds that the static had gone. I tried turning up my hearing slowly, but I didn't catch it again, or the scratching. Whatever they had been, I'd lost them. Or maybe they had lost me. I turned and started marching back to the entrance, determinedly not looking back, even as the thin, barely-there hairs on the back of my neck prickled. My threat assessment module, silent for the duration of my spelunking adventure, suddenly flagged. Even with my reaction time, I didn't have a chance to process the input before it subsided again. Just a glitch, probably triggered by my crossing the point where the feed picked me back up and restored my inputs. As I climbed the pile of rubble at the entrance, I got another singular ping, from the SecUnit that had sent SecUnit 4 the datapacket about cave-ins. It had attached a still image for me, showing me what it was looking at.

A pair of company techs, standing near the habitat and looking bored, one frozen mid-blink. The transport was here. I wouldn't have time to do much more than dust off my armor, but we get dusty in the mines all the time. I acknowledged receipt of the image data, and then I sent HubSystem a report of unusual activity backdated to a few minutes ago, then followed it up with an all-clear. I had heard something unusual and decided to investigate.

And whatever it had been, it was gone now.

(Before I got back to the ready room, I opened my media storage and deleted the serial about ghosts.)

Chapter Text

"That's it. I'm done."

I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms, keeping my eyes fixed on the corner of the room where two walls met the ceiling. Through my drones, I could see that Pin-Lee, Ratthi, Arada, Overse, Bharadwaj, and Gurathin were all staring at me. For most of the time that I was talking, they'd looked away, either at various points in the room or at each other. I actually wasn't sure when they'd all started looking at my face. I didn't want to play back the recording to check. It was sort of creeping me out. Pin-Lee even seemed to have forgotten about the bowl of popcorn on her lap, which she'd been sharing with Ratthi.

"That was very good, SecUnit," said Dr. Mensah. She was the only one who wasn't looking at me, and hadn't the entire time as far as I'd noticed. "Have you considered writing a book?"

"No." That sounded like a great way to get even more attention than I already did, and thanks to the stupid feed ID that identified me as a SecUnit, I already got noticed a lot whenever I went out.

Ratthi swallowed, and said (in a slightly higher octave than normal), "You're not allowed to tell ghost stories anymore, SecUnit."

That was fine by me. I shrugged. "You insisted."

"Well, yeah, but I thought you'd just have some canned crap you heard from a client once. Not—"

"It was great," Pin-Lee interrupted, firmly. "But maybe a little overkill, having the bit about the two humans and one of them was dead, on top of the thing in the mine itself."

"You definitely have a knack for storytelling," added Bharadwaj. "In a variety of genres, apparently."

They'd all calmed down by this point and were looking at different parts of the room again, which was better for me, but the silence that hung in the air was almost as bad. After a 9.4 second eternity, Ratthi said, "Okay, Gurathin. Your turn."

"Pass."

"You always pass," complained Arada. "You read a lot, you've got to have something you can pare down and tell."

"I don't read horror," Gurathin replied. "Mostly nonfiction and geology journals. Do you want a story about haunted rocks?"

Ratthi, Arada, Overse, and Pin-Lee all made booing noises. Pin-Lee tossed a piece of popcorn at Gurathin and hit him directly between the eyes.

"Fine, then, I'll go again!" said Ratthi. "It was a dark and stormy night—"

Everyone groaned. I started up an episode of Sanctuary Moon as background noise, but I didn't completely tune out Ratthi's story. It was silly, and not at all scary, but that was kind of nice in its own way. Preservation is lacking in proper ghost stories, because Preservation is lacking in proper ghosts.