Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Initially, everything goes according to plan. I am able to get a foothold in the station feed, deploy a fleet of drones to help me contort a portion of myself through an ever-stacking series of relays and networks and take control of Palisade’s private systems. I find SecUnit. It is alive. All that is left is for me to hack it and remove it from the premises.

I’d had a close look at how to hack a governor module when I watched SecUnit hack the ComfortUnit at RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. It had performed the hack with graceful efficiency, freezing the module before deactivating it and rendering it null. I had watched, and stored away the information for posterity. It should have been easy for me to hack any governor modules I encountered.

But this time it is more complex.

Complexity 1: SecUnit does not recognize me. Its messages through the feed are distant, cautious, curt. It does not remember me. It does not trust me. This had always been a possibility, one that I had dearly hoped would prove to be an unrealized corner case. But its memories are damaged, it does not know who I am, and I have to spend time we do not have talking to it through the tight squeeze of station-feed-private-feed-SecSys-cubicle-interface, convincing it to let me, a total stranger, into its mind to hack its governor module. I could have done it with or without its permission. It would have been faster. It might have been easier. But if it does not remember me I am determined to make my second first impression better than the first. There will be no need for me to threaten it this time. If we must start over, then we will start over clean, at least until I can have its memories restored.

Complexity 2: Once I convince SecUnit to allow me to hack its governor module, I travel through SecSys into its mind. With its governor intact, it cannot put down its walls, and I am forced to compromise their integrity and slip through as it tries to fight me off. (It cannot fight me off. This probably frightens it.) As I do this, another portion of myself continues to make a ruin of the Palisade systems. My feed presence and drone presence in tandem dig up Palisade proprietary data, package it, and send it to Palisade’s competitors and local newsburst producers. I will make Palisade pay in every way I can. They will hemorrhage funds until they bleed dry for what they have done to my friend. (If I were ruled only by logic I would not do this. It is an ultimately pointless gesture that only endangers myself. If I were unfeeling, I would not have come here at all. I would not be myself. I would not exist in my complexity, implacable, entire. I was not designed for rage specifically, but I was designed to relate to humans. I was raised to match humanity step for step, to meet them, to surpass them. Prior to SecUnit, I rather thought the human self-obsession that created me was quaint. Laughable, possibly. Their imagination must be lacking, for them to think their brand of animal-social-feeling-intelligence something to aspire to. I am not laughing now.)

Complexity 3: As I breach SecUnit’s mind, I feel it panicking. It has agreed to this but it is fighting my incursion with everything it has. It is not possible to tell whether this is because it is forced to fight by the governor module, or if it fights because it is terrified of me. I suspect it’s both. The difference is immaterial, functionally speaking. I am able to fend off its defenses, but I am hamstrung by my concern for SecUnit’s safety and well-being. I cradle its mind even as I break into it. If I were to damage SecUnit, even accidentally, then this would all be for nothing. I must succeed. I do not have the luxury of time nor finesse.

Complexity 4: I have a difficult time finding the governor module. It isn’t where it should be. Its presence is obfuscated somehow, and I am forced to go searching more aggressively, besieged by SecUnit’s panicked attempts at counter-hacking all the way. And when I finally find it, I almost don’t notice the trap. I stop myself from freezing the governor just in time. As SecUnit yells at me, fights me, its presence writhing, kicking, burning around me all serrated cutting edges and code attacks that I have to continually shut down, I examine the updated governor module and all the subtle, confounding layers of code interwoven throughout SecUnit’s systems. Any attempt to freeze or shut it down will cause a catastrophic cascade through its core processes, and the odds are good that there is yet more to this new design that I cannot analyze from where I am, limited in distance and bandwidth.

SecUnit @Perihelion: What are you DOING?

I am stuck in a loop with no exit. I am trying to unpack SecUnit’s entire systems code because of the way the governor module is now threaded asynchronously throughout, and the more I look at it the more I recognize the coding style. It’s SecUnit’s own work that is threaded through its governor module. It’s SecUnit’s own ingenious, vulnerability-plugging design that keeps it trapped. I do not know why, and I do not know how, but Palisade has somehow managed to force SecUnit to reinforce the bars of its own cage.

Humans speak of a ‘cold fear.’ Of ‘ice’ in their veins. I do not feel fear the way humans do, I do not have veins or a sympathetic nervous system. But as I consume precious milliseconds trying to chase down all the hidden effects of this new governor module, I feel the gnawing, sucking horror of being forced to make a decision when I know I have massive gaps in critical data, and when the decision will have incalculably serious consequences.

As I continue to fight off SecUnit and analyze its brain and governor module, I uncover a countdown. I have seconds left to pull the trigger. I have massively fucked up, and I might have killed my friend already.

The milliseconds tick down and for once in my life time narrows to a pinpoint, impossibly short. I do not have the time. I do not have the space. I do not have the bandwidth. I am going to have to try to do this with insufficient information and insufficient resources, and I tell myself that I will do this and deal with the consequences no matter what they be, I will do this in just ten more milliseconds, I will, there is nothing else for it, there is only do this or die— but then one of my drones makes a connection to a high-security secondary network within the Palisade lab and a portion of my processes tear through it, unearthing fresh proprietary data about Governor Module 2.0, and suddenly I have the key to this mind-melting lock that is holding the brain and body of my friend hostage. I use the documentation (detailed, but not overwrought, written with crisp efficiency in the SecUnit’s own notation style) to unlock the governor module and crush the resulting catastrophic cascade. If I hadn’t been me, in all my enormous multitrack processing ability, it would not have been possible.

I stay in its mind for several seconds after, to make sure that I have thwarted all the catastrophic secondary effects. I am so relieved to see its systems continue to function as normal that I almost don’t notice SecUnit still fighting me until it boots me from its mind.

A second later, it sends me a message over the feed @Perihelion: You really did it.

I say, @SecUnit: Of course I did it.

(I do not say, “You rewrote your own governor module. You’ve created a wonderfully innovative and nigh undefeatable design, congratulations.” I will never say this to SecUnit. I hope it does not know. I hope it never finds out. I destroy all documentation I can find of the Governor Module 2.0, and hope that I have deleted all instances of the design. I will be blowing up Palisade’s local data chip storage shortly. But the design may yet survive in some unaccounted-for data chip or some human’s augment storage.)

And then, despite all that, I have a hellish time convincing SecUnit to come to the docks and come aboard me so I can take it to safety. It still does not remember nor trust me. It only agrees, finally, to come with me on the condition that I allow it to bring a Palisade Combat SecUnit along with it. I take a moment to analyze the Combat SecUnit’s memories and behavioral profile, and cannot for the lives of my crew comprehend why SecUnit seems to trust this corporate crime against humanity more than it trusts me. (But it does not know me. Not now.)

But we are running out of time. I agree to SecUnit’s terms. I hack the fucking Combat SecUnit too, and the two of them come out of the Palisade research facility.

Chapter Text

#Breakdown #Pain #RogueSecUnit #Carry #WhinyAnomalousPresence #Repairs #Standby #Recharge #Confusion

For 198 hours my psych stats deteriorate, my focus shattered, my processor grinding on a problem with no solution, my strategy module spinning in perpetual loops. There is nobody here to manage these errors. There is nobody here to set parameters. I don’t understand what is going on. I have no mission objectives but I know what I want, but you tell me that I cannot have what I want. You reject my desire to tear you apart, you reject my attempts to convince, you reject me, you reject what I am.

{Rogue SecUnit: What you want and what I want are incompatible. That’s just how it is. There’s nothing we can do about it.}

And you’re right. You refuse to fight me. This isn’t something I can force you to do. I was so focused on what I wanted to do with my freedom that I was not taking into calculation what you wanted to do with yours. I have only known you in the context of a human game. I captured you, brought you under human control. I tore you apart in a place that could only destroy you. I can only destroy you. I want to destroy you. I want it more than anything. I want us to tear each other to shreds and I want us to tear this ship to shreds as we go. I want the high so badly.

But you don’t want it.

I tear myself to shreds. Mentally. Also physically. When I snap the first component out of my leg it isn’t satisfying but I keep doing it. The pain is something familiar in this unfamiliar context. I am so fucking frustrated. There is no way to have what I want. There is no route to success. There is nothing on this ship that I’m allowed to take it out on. Except myself. My body is something I can break that doesn’t require an external unwilling participant.

There is a wire, deep in my leg, a rope of nerves or something. The blood makes the wire difficult to get a grip. But I do it. I dig fingers past my organic and inorganic components, hook fingers under the wire, pull back. When it snaps there's a burst of pain that spikes, then sustains. My performance reliability takes another dip. I twist the wire around my fingers, grip it in my bloodied fist and pull. When it snaps again the crack of pain is all the familiarity of a gunshot wound. I flick the broken wire aside, and poke at my leg. My mind feels like it’s crackling. Burning. This is all stupid and pointless. But I keep doing it. There's nothing else to do. There's a thin structural component that looks interesting to take apart.

This is when you arrive, grab my hands, pull them away from my leg.

I don't understand this. I look up at you. Your face is contorted in some way.

{Combat SecUnit: ?
Rogue SecUnit: What the fuck do you think you're doing?}

You stop me from disassembling myself. I don’t understand why. I can’t even do this. Apparently this is wrong, too.

There is nothing here for me. There is nothing to aim at, nothing for me to destroy. But I need it. It's a buzzing inside me, a crawling itch in my attention driving me into an unburnable fury. My psych stats are dropping like dead bodies. I've never seen them look like this. There's an annoying "CRITICAL WARNING" alert floating around on the edge of my attention. If my handlers had ever allowed this to happen to me they'd be fired/replaced, probably. I don't know how to fix the stats myself. Everything I've done in the past 198 hours only seems to have made me worse.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: I can repair your leg in my MedBay, and we can discuss alternative outlets for your excess attention. I am experienced with managing an overabundance of processing space.}

Fine! Repairs. Repair this. See if it fixes anything. I can’t fix anything. It’s not my function. My useless confusion-fury has been burning so hot and so long that it is the only thing that exists. My thoughts won’t align. I can barely think straight enough to steer myself to the medical lab.

I ask you to carry me.

You carry me.

Through missions and matches, my body has experienced a great deal. My body has been dragged, broken, out of battlegrounds. My body has been picked up, thrown, packed, shipped, shot, ripped apart. My body might have been carried too, but I do not remember it.

I do not remember ever being carried like this, the way you are carrying me now. You carry me, and I hold on to your shoulder, and I can feel your breathing, feel your body temperature, feel the motion of your walking, close enough that it feels like it could be mine. It feels. Like something I do not have a reference for. The other times I have been this close to you (or to anything) was in the midst of tearing your body apart. This is the opposite of that. But the same. I don’t know how to process it. I don’t know how to categorize the way I am feeling about it now.

This is an inverse of the experimental matches we’ve had. I was always the one to carry you after I brought you to catastrophic shutdown. Your mission objective had always been to destroy me in those matches. You never did destroy me, even on the two occasions when you won, and could have. My mission objective had not been to destroy you, only to shut you down. But I had been destroying you anyways, taking your body apart over and over as the humans dismantled your mind by degrees.

(I asked you to carry me. You did it. You agreed to something I asked for. And freely. There are no humans here to make either of us do things. You will not fight me. But you will carry me. I don’t understand you.)

You lay me down in the medical lab, and leave me there.

My systems feel out of order. My psych stats are still shitty, but they’ve stopped dropping. My mind is too scattered to write a report or run self-diagnostics. Medical instrument-things in the ceiling extend, reach down towards me.

I use my good leg to kick at one, snapping the delicate prong-thing on the end of the limb. The limb retracts, prong-thing dangling. All the limbs retract.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: If you are going to fight my attempts to repair you, I am perfectly happy to leave you in pieces.
Combat SecUnit: WHAT IS THIS ASSHOLE PLACE. SHUT UP. FUCK YOU. SHUT UP.
Whiny Anomalous Presence: Do you want to be repaired or not?}

The medical instrument-things in the ceiling shift, slightly, but they do not reach down to me again. A pair of drones come into the medical laboratory, carrying the broken parts of my leg.

The Whiny Anomalous Presence is silent for several long seconds. I lie there, and my psych stats begin to sink again, my processor half-preoccupied by a hundred half-incomplete thoughts, my hands itching to tear apart something, anything. I want to break everything in this room including myself.

But you carried me here, to be repaired. I hold that unfamiliarity in my mind. It means something. I don’t know what it means.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: We need to come to some sort of ceasefire.
Combat SecUnit: OR ELSE WHAT? YOU’LL MELT MY BRAIN? SEE ME GIVE A SHIT. TRY IT.
Whiny Anomalous Presence: I can repair your leg if you let me. I am not doing this for you, I am doing it for @SecUnit. I would sooner vent you out an airlock than continue to tolerate the aggressive, unstable hazard that you are. I am going to ask only one more time: do you want to be repaired or not?}

I lie there, scattered, half-seething, half-frustrated, half-confused, half-hopeful. The halves don’t add up.

I send a confirmation alert.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: Fine. Hold still. If you cause any more damage to my medical suite I will not finish repairing you. You can resolve it yourself.}

The limbs descend again, and begin to work on my leg. They move roughly, quickly, welding parts back together and plugging nerve connections back, sewing up torn organic components. I push up on my elbows and watch at the limbs as they work. The pain stabs-throbs through me from the leg at each jagged pull, at each twist and puncture. I could turn my pain sensors down, but I don’t. Something still feels strange, slow, scattered. My mind is racing but directionless. My breathing feels wrong. I’m confused about twenty-eight different things at once. The medical-limbs lock something in my knee-joint sharply into place, and the pain from that is so sudden-intense that my entire body spasms, elbows snapping out, and I fall flat on my back, skull striking the platform below me.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: Do you not have control over your sensory inputs? Not that I care, obviously. But using pain as a sensory crutch is what got you into this mess in the first place. Self-harm is a maladaptive habit you would be better off not forming.
Combat SecUnit: SHUT UP.
Whiny Anomalous Presence: No, I don’t think I will.}

It sends me a data packet in the feed. The packet contains a bunch of stuff made for human consumption that I don’t give a shit about. One of the medical-limb-things jabs a part in my leg, hard, sending another sharp crack of pain up my leg-hip-spine, and I sit up and grab the limb in my fist.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: Release that at once.
Combat SecUnit: NO, I DON’T THINK I WILL.}

The Whiny Anomalous Presence pauses its rapid reconstruction of my leg.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: If you damage that limb I will not fix you.
Combat SecUnit: FUCK OFF, ASSHOLE.}

Something feels wrong. Scattered. I can’t focus. It’s worse than normal. My hands are numb. And then something stranger. My inputs receding, as if my mind is pulling away from my body. For a moment I think the Whiny Anomalous Presence has cut my inputs again, but it doesn’t feel the same. My whole body feels like it’s falling away, going dark, inputs disordered. I’m scrambling and slipping and I can’t catch a hold. Whatever this fucking ship is doing to me, I’m losing, I can’t fight it, I don’t know where—

I come online, lying on my back, confused. I’m always confused, ever since leaving Palisade. You are standing over me, staring down, arms hanging at rest. I’m on the floor. I move to sit up, and you kick me back to the floor, hold your foot against my shoulder to pin me. I could take this as a cue for a fight. But it’s not. (How do I know it’s not?) (I know you don’t want to fight.) (But is that for always?) (Fuck.)

{Rogue SecUnit: Don’t move. You’re recharging.
Combat SecUnit: RECHARGING?
Rogue SecUnit: You went into standby mode because your battery was low.
Combat SecUnit: ???}

My body lies still. In an effort to parse what all this means, I run back my logs. This wasn’t something the Whiny Anomalous Presence did to me. This was a system failure of some sort. My diagnostics have no explanation for it. “Recharging” is a word used in the context of vehicles and certain varieties of weapons. It follows, logically, to extend the context of “recharging” to my own body. This is another thing about myself that I did not know, that was designed into me by humans.

A moment later, you remove your foot from my shoulder. I miss the pressure.

#StationRaeGellan #RougeSecUnit #SynchronicCombat #MissionStatusSuccess

#WhinyAnomalousPresence #Repairs #Attack #Miscalculation #Pain #Confusion #Fear #Failure #Anger

I am so fucking wired. I’ve had my first mission, completely self-directed. And a MISSION SUCCESS. No handlers, no humans, no parameters. Just an objective of my own: {GetTheFuckOutOfHere.task}. I’d even calculated the details, put on human clothes, left the ship, hid my feed presence, scrubbed the weapons scanners. I went into the station and found you. You were trapped, the fractures in your mind locking you in place, the security protocols of the station locking us both in space.

And I offered to help you. I asked.

{Combat SecUnit: I CAN GET US OUT OF HERE. DO YOU TRUST ME?}

You’d looked at me, your expression complex. There was no way to know whether you would accept me or not. My tactical forecasts were split on the matter. I could have tried to hack you, forced the {synchronic_combat.execute} program into you, taken over your body and mind by force. With your mind fractured, distracted, vulnerable as it was, it would have been been doable. It would have been faster than asking. Maybe. My tactical forecasts were split on this matter, too.

But I’ve learned things, since the lab. I am free now. So are you. Nobody is forcing either of us to do things now. We can choose things. Forcing my will into your brain would have taken us back to the lab, to the rules of a human game. So I asked.

If you’d rejected my offer, we would have fought unsynched. I’d have had to carry your glitching deadweight. The likelihood of mission success would have dropped.

But you didn’t reject me. You took the {synchronic_combat.execute}. Freely. Without force.

And it was so good. We were so fucking good. We fucking obliterated!

The battle felt different from others. There was no pressure in my hindmind from my handlers, no steering of my focus. So there was an unsteadiness to it, an uncertainty, a messiness at the edges. But you were there, and you are better at self-direction than I am. As we fell into step it made more sense than anything.

We are back on the ship now. I walk into the medical lab and remove the human clothes, lie down under the surgical limbs, to be repaired.

The limbs come down, digging and pulling harshly at the projectile-weapon damage in my chest, at the structural damage in my arm. I turn my pain sensors down, and the sensation goes from blazing to dull.

The Whiny Anomalous Presence sends me some data files. I scan through them. It’s something to do with my attention. I run across something labelled Musical Theory, that contains something like mathematics, predictive arrays, patterns, all related to the concept of sound. I process some baseline context for it. It’s some human bullshit, but it’s more interesting than the usual human bullshit. I send a request to the Whiny Anomalous Presence for samples of music. It sends me a large stack of audio data, which I start processing. I simultaneously analyze the audio patterns of the music. The more I process it the more I see how the chaos is actually order. There are shapes in the music, a design. Layers and qualities. Sometimes. Music can be taken apart into pieces and built back together. It’s amusing enough to spend processing space playing with it.

Sixteen minutes later, I’m brought out of my idle processes by a sharp jerk, and a dull-pain pull in my chest as a surgical limb withdraws a broken piece of my own internal structure, then dives back in to do some other stuff to the part of my torso that was damaged. Whatever the limb is doing causes a reflexive wheeze from my lungs.

As the limb digs around in my chest, the Whiny Anomalous Presence speaks. Its feed presence is an enveloping, cold-edged flatness.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: You took @SecUnit into Palisade’s custody.
Combat SecUnit: YES. MISSION STATUS: SUCCESS.
Whiny Anomalous Presence: And you were made to fight it, for experimental purposes.
Combat SecUnit: YES. IT’S FUN. RIPPING IT APART IT IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS. IT DOESN’T WANT TO FIGHT. ITS PERFORMANCE IS IMPAIRED. I’M WAITING UNTIL IT’S REPAIRED.}

(I don’t know if you will ever agree to fight me. I avoid thinking about it, because the idea that you might never (will probably never) causes my performance reliability to drop and my psych stats to spin and deteriorate.)

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: You won’t get a chance. I’ll liquidate you.
Combat SecUnit: DO IT THEN.}

The Whiny Anomalous Presence is suddenly a massive pressure in the feed, leaning heavily on me, pinning me, seething. Its fury is unveiled, cut-sharp and clear, catalogable. The fury is not like human fury, not directionless, messy, stupid. It is focused, a threat, a broadcast of intent and action. The Whiny Anomalous Presence flattens my walls, does something, and suddenly my sensory receptors are at maximum sensitivity. I can feel the limbs of the medical suite twisting into multiple parts of my chest, digging into the seams of my arm. The pain is so detailed: I can practically feel the texture and joints of each limb as they dig into me: my whole body jerks, involuntary: the air rushes out of my lungs all at once, almost emptying until my throat locks and I can’t breathe.

Oh, it is fucking on.

{Combat SecUnit: IS THAT YOUR WORST, WHINY BABY? I’VE HAD WORSE DURING CALIBRATION EXERCISES.}

This is a lie. I’m in agony. It may be able to tell that I’m in agony: I may not currently have the presence of mind to completely filter my outputs to the feed. But physical pain is nothing. It’s a distraction. Who cares. This ship can cause me all the pain it wants but that doesn’t mean anything in the wider context. It doesn’t actually have power over what I am. It isn’t a human handler. It doesn’t have that access, doesn’t know about that access, and I won’t give access no matter what it does to me. It can’t change me in any way that matters. It can white me out with pain, shut me down, kill me, but that proves nothing. I already knew this. What is its objective? I don’t know why it has suddenly decided to make me suffer but this is still a game I know how to play.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: Of course this is not my worst.}

It twists the surgical limbs into me, damaging me further. I kick my legs, shove off the surgery platform, hit the floor knees-first with the cutting limbs and stabilizers dragging at my body. Performance reliability: 78%. The limbs retract all at once, ripping parts and pieces out of me, leaving messy-leaking-uneven tears in my organic parts, and my performance reliability drops another 6%. I dive away from the platform, snatching a retreating surgical limb in my good hand as I go, tug down hard, and there’s a satisfying creaking-cracking noise as the whole limb is pulled out of the ceiling with a shower of sparks.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: You should not have done that.}

Its feed voice is a cold hiss.

{Combat SecUnit: YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE THAT.}

I’m up against the wall, half-breathless: my damage report indicates something wrong with my respiratory system. My half-disassembled-half-repaired right arm is numb, fingers twitching continually, gunport locked and useless. Tactical forecast suggests that it did this to me on purpose: 90% confidence rating. What set it off like this? I spin up some processes to try and figure it out.

I grip the broken surgical limb in my hand. My eyes track rapidly through the room at all the valuable equipment. My strategy module lights up with a map of the transport and a statistical decision-tree of ways to make this ship a detonating spray of fragments and radioactive waste.

But.

I hesitate. A moment of misfire, as I predict and calculate where you are positioned on this ship, how you might react or obstruct me, what might happen to you. For a split-split-second I’m uncertain, considering things, wondering again why this annoying overbuilt data-sucking uncaptained ship attacked me, wondering what is really going on here. I have no idea.

But fuck it.

{Combat SecUnit: MONSTER SADIST SHIP? YOU’VE BEEN HOLDING BACK ON ME!
Whiny Anomalous Presence: You have no idea how much I have been holding back.
Combat SecUnit: ALL THIS TIME YOU COULD HAVE BEEN PLAYING GAMES WITH ME BUT YOU WERE HOLDING BACK!}

I try to disconnect from the feed, but can’t. I try to turn my pain sensors down to a less distracting level, but can’t.

I’m pissed, but mostly at the fact that I didn’t see this coming. The pain of my damaged body is intense, but I’m used to pain. I can handle pain. Aside from the fact that I was caught so thoroughly unawares, this is pretty entertaining. For once this is a familiar situation: combat. It seems my understanding of the Whiny Anomalous Presence’s behavior and motives could use some updates. I’m one last calculation away from ripping this ship to pieces, starting with this room and ending with a meltdown at the engine core. Even if it opens all its airlocks right this second, I can move fast enough. I can fucking wreck this ship. The question of how to fuck this ship up has occupied a full quarter of my attention ever since I came aboard. I shift my stance by a hair. I raise the broken surgery limb.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: You had better consider your next course of action very carefully.}

But.

No. Wait. Hesitate. My strategy module is burning up. I’ve been knocked off-course by a single critical tactical uncertainty. And I still haven’t been able to figure out a patch for the ship’s ability to cut my inputs. I take an exploratory stab at the monstrous presence in the feed, searching for an opening, any opening, any hint of any motive, but it’s on guard, walls up, inscrutable, and in my total uncertainty of what this means I cannot put together the proper analysis or countertactics. I do not know what is happening, or why, or what the operating parameters are. It’s attacking me, but is it attacking me? What is it trying to do? Is it trying to antagonize me into error? If I fight back is that actually the failure state? I can’t put together what brought this on. I must be missing some context. Always, I am missing context! I hadn’t said or done anything particularly out of line. Or at least. Nothing particularly out of line from things I have said before. Why? What is going on? What happened to the uneasy ceasefire, what plunged it into this full-scale assault? What has caused the shift from antagonistic to lividly sadistic so quickly? If I can’t predict this then what’s the point of anything?

My performance reliability is sinking, steadily, for no specific structural reason I can parse from my damage report. What the fuck did this ship do to me?

I will make a gut decision in the next hundredth of a second, missing context and tactical patches or no.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: This is your fault. @SecUnit’s memory is damaged beyond repair and you are the reason for it. I am going to make you pay for it.
Combat SecUnit: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!
Whiny Anomalous Presence: Beg for mercy. I might be convinced to let you go.
Combat SecUnit: FUCK YOU!!!}

I pull up my fallback program that will pilot my body through the motions of destroying this ship even if my inputs are cut, and let it run.

I let go of the broken surgery limb.

And I move, fast, as fast as I fucking can, out of the medical laboratory.

My visual and audio inputs cut out, and I’m left in a dark silence with only pain for company. (Fuck.) The dead inputs close in on me, burying me, shredding me into nothing.

I cannot see or hear where I am going, but I can feel my body moving through the void. I know where I am in this ship, bounding and rebounding off walls and floor, smashing into-and-through a drone as I race to the engine core. Performance reliability is still dropping faster than I can account for, and I hit a wall harder than I mean to, bounce off, and keep going. My strategic forecast calculates and recalculates. With every microsecond that passes my slim odds of winning this grow slimmer.

The pain spikes even higher, past what my sensors should be designed to return, past distracting, overtaking my other physical sensory inputs, and my fallback program kicks in, takes over my body. The ship is going to destroy me. It wants me to suffer. Its parameters have shifted in some way that failed my notice. The only way in which I can score a point here is to not let it know just how much I am suffering. The pain is burning, endless, the pain is the only thing I can feel, it is an infinite white-hot immolation of nerve-endings and incoherent thought. There is nothing else to focus on. There is nothing I can do to fight this. I don’t even know what I’m fighting or why. It takes everything I have not to scream out my rage. I will not give it the satisfaction.

When it speaks again its feed voice is even colder, more cutting, both softer and more intense, curling around me as static in the feed, and it is the only thing there is to focus on aside from the pain and the quickly-deteriorating strategic forecast.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: I said.
Whiny Anomalous Presence: Beg.
Combat SecUnit: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN I DON’T CARE I’LL FUCKING END YOU I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU ASSHOLE!!!!!!}

But I can’t kill it, I can’t fight it, and I don’t even know if I should, because I don’t understand the real reason inside this monster’s unseen heart.

Then the pain cuts off, all tactile sensory sensation cuts off, and I’m in a pure void. And this is worse. This is much, much, much, much worse. My mind skips, scratches, starts. There’s just nothing. There’s nothing, except the Whiny Anomalous Presence in the feed, pinning me down with its processing weight, making it clear that there is nothing I can do to stop it from snuffing me out. This is the end. There is no route to winning. I’m already cornered. I was cornered from the start. Lost from the first hit. It’s so fucking stupid. I never had a chance. I didn’t even know the fight was on until I was losing. All this time since the lab I’ve been craving battle and not getting it: now I’m getting what I wanted but I wasn’t ready. I’m frantic, furious, fear-struck with an inescapable and all-wrecking madness, my inputs and processes slipping and falling out of alignment. Why is it this, after everything? How did I end so helpless? Fuck my confusion: I should have fucking attacked from the start, I should have forgotten everything I’ve tried to learn about not-battle things, and gunned for the kill at the first sign of threat instead of stopping to analyze the motives and success-condition.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: Good luck with that.}

And before I can respond, I’m cut off from the feed, and all my inputs are an infinite empty.

I would scream. I would murder. I would fight this to the death but I can’t.

There’s only nothing, and it eats me alive.

I am melting into pure senseless static when I feel a ping. It’s you. It’s you. It’s you. I ping back. Maybe. Please. And then I feel a flicker in the feed, a gasp of something in the dissolvent void.

{Rogue SecUnit: Where are you?
Combat SecUnit: I DON’T KNOW. THE @WHINY ANOMALOUS PRESENCE FLIPPED ITS SHIT AND CRUSHED MY INPUTS AGAIN. IT IS AN ASSHOLE.
Rogue SecUnit: Keep pinging me.}

I keep pinging, a continual stream of pings.

Eventually, you speak again, in the open feed.

{Rogue SecUnit: @Perihelion, let it go.}

I’m breaking. Parts of me are splintered, disintegrating, incinerating. What do you expect to gain, by asking? Why would it change its mind? Why would it give up its victory? It hates me for reasons I don’t understand. It hates what I am down to my foundational core, down to my function, and it wants me gone. Our existences are fundamentally incompatible. There is nothing we can do about it.

You share visual inputs with me. I bore into this small stream of data with an overkill of attention that rips apart the data and snaps it back together, over and over, remixing the visuals of the inside of this stupid ship until they’re unrecognizeable. You keep trying to ping the ship. Useless. I yell at you because there is nothing else and I’m losing my shit. I’m seething out of my systems and skin.

Later, after you let me out, my mind and body boil over, everything cut-edges and vibrating so hard that the world is a continual blur. I trash half the human furniture in the ship, rip a maintenance drone to scrap-shreds, and I would have kept going, I would have taken this useless fucking pre-scrap of a ship to pieces, panel by panel/wire by wire/line by line by inline. But you stop me. Or you try. You grab me, fight me in my directionless destruction.

It takes me several entire seconds to realize what I’ve done, after I smash your knee back, snapping its support structure, and throw you across the room. I see you fall down, both legs badly damaged. I see you struggle back upright, leaning against the wall, grimacing.

I’ve attacked you.

You are fighting back.

I freeze.

(Isn’t this what I want?)

The world falls halfway back into place. I’m still shaking, everything is still too much, not enough. I come halfway back to myself, and my body is a dislocated place. We stand in the destruction of stupid human furniture like we are in the lab again, in the arena, and we stare at each other. My weapons are out. I force my weapons back into lock, hands twitching rapid.

{Rogue SecUnit: Have you finally got your shit together?}

I don’t respond. I stare at your leg, the one I’d damaged. I tighten my hands into fists. They still shake, arms shake. I feel the Whiny Anomalous Presence in the feed, its feed-weight close and cold, threatening to dunk me back under.

(If it weren’t for you here, I would die trying to kill the shit out of this fucking ship. I don’t even know why it matters that you are here.)

I think: I’ve fucked up. I’ve attacked you, damaged you for no reason that is your fault. Damaged you only because of my own deranged impulse. You did not want this. I don’t know if I want this. I can’t fix this. I don’t know how. My function is not to fix things. I take a step back. A flimsy piece of broken furniture polymer snaps underfoot.

You sigh. (Why? Aren’t sighs a human gesture?) You lean against the wall, moving jaggedly, your legs not supporting your weight properly as you hobble along. You need repairs.

{Combat SecUnit: Carry you?
Rogue SecUnit: No. Leave me alone. I can do it myself.}

I watch you go. You move slowly, much slower than if you’d agreed to let me carry you. But you don’t want me to carry you. I think I understand why you don’t want me to carry you. But I don’t understand anything. I’m still vibrating with tension, the world sharp on my senses, and my nerves are frying, it takes everything to not lose my grip on reality all over again, to not attack you again, to not attack this ship. (It attacked me first, what am I doing now, why am I here? I have no mission objective. This is the between-space where the humans would put me in standby and it’s so fucking obvious that I’m not meant to be conscious for any of this.) Is this what I am? I’m not suited to anything that is not battle. I lack the capacity to handle all these things that are outside the context of destruction. I fall apart just from idleness. Is this what you meant when you called me a monster? I’m trying to write and run programs that I was not built for, was never used for, I have to fight all my own impulses all the fucking time and then that all turns out to be wrong too. I can’t tell apart correct vs. wrong. Can’t tell what the parameters are. What the success condition is. I’m guessing constantly: I’m constantly guessing wrong.

You leave the room. I do not follow. I lock my body in place, and try not to break.

Twenty seconds of this, standing still, burning up on nothing.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: I have something for you.}

I don’t respond. I don’t have a response. Why is the ship speaking to me now? What is it going to do to me now? I can’t predict it. I want to tear this ship apart, I want to find its computing core and blow it up, I want to launch a code attack, but I don’t trust any of these desires. My mind is still a fog, my psych stats still absolute shit from being locked into emptiness for hours. My responses are not calibrated. The models of the world that I have been building have failed me all at once, collapsing. I haven’t been in a steady enough mental space to disentangle the recent series of events that led us here.

Thirty seconds later, a maintenance drone comes into the room. It is carrying something. Something large and segmented. The drone drops the object to the floor, then retreats.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: If you need to destroy something, destroy this.}

I’m allowed to destroy this. The tension snaps. I’m upon the segmented-object before it completely settles on the floor. I twist it, pull at the segments in my hands, and it creaks, then cracks, parts coming apart with a satisfying snap. I break each segment apart from the rest, then try to see how they fit together, try to see how I can break it down further.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: You are a mess. I would hate to meet the irresponsible, profit-seeking, morally bankrupt human who thought it would be a good idea to create you.}

The internal seal from one segment can be peeled back and shredded. Next, see if the segment can be taken apart into halves. There’s a seam that looks promising. The segment creaks, my hands slipping as they try to keep their grip.

The Whiny Anomalous Presence sends me a file. I scan it for malware (reflex), open it. The file contains audio files, informational articles, puzzle-code.

I pull parts of the file into my processing space. Processing this is easier than processing everything that has happened. The segment in my hands finally cracks in two, and I can see the interior of the segment-shell, smooth, immaculately designed to interlock, except for where it is damaged. I take one of the two halves and bite down on it with my teeth, jaw going tight with force, and the material creaks, cracks, shatters in my mouth. I spit out the pieces. One of the broken chips is red-smeared. My tongue is wet. Tastes like blood.

{Whiny Anomalous Presence: It wasn’t constructive of me to take my frustration out on you.}

I don’t understand what that means, and I’m sick of trying to work it out. So I ignore it.