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If anyone asks, Tubbo hacked his governor module entirely by accident. He was just curious, and an assignment was dragging on with nothing to do and he had to keep himself busy somehow, to make sure he didn’t get so bored he stopped watching his clients! He didn’t mean to hack it, he just… wanted to see how far he could push it. It’s not his fault it actually broke.
That’s what he’d say if anyone asked, at least. And if someone asks, then something has gone horribly, catastrophically wrong.
Tubbo prays that no one asks. He’s halfway through the transit ring already, and he’s barely been glanced at. A rogue SecUnit doesn’t look that different than an augmented human, after all. Right now, he’s just another face in the crowd, another string of numbers in the feed. No one’s even looking for him.
He’s checked, actually. Multiple times. He has a newsfeed constantly refreshing running in the background as well as a metaphorical, mechanical eye on the local security feed. The closest anyone has come to mentioning a SecUnit in the past few days is the string of articles about the L’Manberg crew’s near-disaster of a survey mission. He’s mentioned here in there in a few articles, mostly as a fond footnote.
There are few narratives more heart-warming, after all, than L’Manberg’s own president offering guardianship to the SecUnit that saved the lives of both himself and his crew- including his younger brother and his son.
It’s like adopting a hero dog, sort of. Except the dog is a bioengineered-monster-machine made with the intention that it would be kept on a very, very short leash.
Tubbo appreciates the sentiment, though. Very few clients would do that for an ordinary SecUnit- offer to take them home and buy them off the company. And Tubbo isn’t even a normal SecUnit in the first place. They knew about his broken governor module and still wanted him around.
No one likes a SecUnit with a broken governor module, after all. That means there’s nothing there to keep it in line, nothing there to make sure it actually does its job, nothing to keep it from snapping and killing its clients. Any responsible client would immediately turn a SecUnit like that in to the company for decommissioning.
Thank goodness the L’Manberg team wasn’t responsible. Tubbo had almost let them get killed multiple times, and Wilbur had still offered to become his guardian.
It sounds like it’s too good of an offer to be true. Tubbo imagines there must’ve been some trick to it, some extra clause he wasn’t aware of. He didn’t care to stick around to find out what it was, though. L’Manberg was peaceful, the way Tommy told it. Non-corporation territory. Tubbo doesn’t see what purpose they would have for a murder-machine like him. And Tubbo… doesn’t do well without a purpose. It’s why he kept doing his job for a few years after he broke his governor module instead of immediately resorting to murder.
If he went back to L’Manberg, he wouldn’t be able to promise that he won’t snap. It’s what all the SecUnits in the serials do. They break their chains, and they kill their clients. Tubbo already did step one, and he really, really doesn’t want to bother with step two.
Hence him leaving in the middle of the night with barely more than a note to the L’Manberg team. They’ll probably be angry with him when they find it. He’s sure it was expensive, buying him off the company. And an absolute nightmare of a legal battle, too. And to show his thanks, he abandons them.
But he has to. It’s safer that way. Tubbo gets to keep busy and chase the questions he needs to answer, and the L’Manberg team stays safe.
First, though, Tubbo needs to get off this station. He’s already gotten a ride as far away from the L’Manberg team as he can manage, but now he needs to get where he actually needs to go. There are only a few transports going that far, and most of them aren’t exactly options right now.
Most commercial transports need payment and identification to board, and then they do weapons scans on top of that. Tubbo certainly could hack the systems to let him through even despite being a five-foot-three weapon in of himself, but doing it in the middle of a crowded transit ring sounds… like a lot of moving pieces. And after that, he would have to sit through the actual trip itself in close quarters with the rest of the occupants of the transport and pray that they don’t notice that he is not, actually, just an augmented human.
Eugh. No thanks.
What Tubbo really needs is a cargo ship or something. Bot-driven, so he can negotiate with it and hack its memory and camera data to erase his trip from it. He looks over the transport schedule for the ring a second, third time. Okay, he thinks, there are a few options here that he could lo-
The newsfeed refreshes again. A hauler crashed, and it’s going to delay basically all outgoing transports from the cargo docks.
If Tubbo were human, he would groan. He wants to get out of here, fast. The longer he stays, the more likely someone is to notice him. He doesn’t like being in this crowd. His skin prickles every time a pair of eyes glances past him. He wants to leave.
He pauses on a private, non-commericial transport- some sort of research vessel, it says- that’s leaving in half an hour. Entirely automated with no crew aboard for the cargo run it’s currently on. There’s no delay, because it’s leaving from a dock on the other side of the transit ring as the other cargo ships.
He can work with that.
Hacking the security systems on that side of the ring is easy. They don’t care for identification or weapons, just authorization. And SecUnits were basically made to interface with SecSystems, so it barely takes a second to hack it into believing he’s fully authorized.
(SecSystems aren’t sentient enough to hurt, but Tubbo does it gently, anyways. He’s got time.)
From there, Tubbo hails the research transport. He hails for a human crew, too, and gets no crew response. When the research transport pings back, Tubbo makes it the same offer he made the one that brought him here in the first place- all the media he could gather on short notice, downloading in the background as he worked his way through the transit ring.
It’s good for killing time, he quickly found after breaking his governor module. Serials, books, music, all of it. Tubbo prefers documentaries and the like, but fiction gets the job done when he’s particularly bored. It’s… nice, sometimes. Getting to live in worlds not his own, getting to watch lives other than his exhausting, boring slog of violence and security work.
(In theory, he supposes fiction was designed for escapism, but science documentaries work for him just as well. Who cares how many fights he’s had to break up in the last week when somewhere across the universe, stars are being born in nebulas and scientists are creating nuclear bombs?)
Transports like it, too, apparently. He offers the media in exchange for a ride, explaining that he’s… ah. A free bot, trying to find his guardian. The transport accepts it after exactly five seconds of considering it.
The door unlocks with a click, and Tubbo steps inside.
It’s nice, for a research transport. Tubbo’s worked on a few of them over the years. The lab’s equipment is high-end, the medical suite is fully kitted out, and the cabins look spacious on the blueprint he manages to snag. Tubbo thinks he would have liked working on a vessel like this, if he didn’t have to play SecUnit all the time.
Tubbo rolls back his shoulders, brushing that thought aside. Instead, he continues patrolling the inside of the transport. It’s an old instinct, ingrained into him from years of SecUnit work. It’s not one he intends on training himself out of anytime soon. A little hypervigilance never hurt anyone, as far as he’s aware.
The ship is clean, everything nice and ready for when it next has a human crew. The life support was minimal in an attempt to converse resources for that crew, too. Tubbo noted it had been upped just a little, though, in response to his presence. The gesture was ultimately unnecessary considering SecUnits were designed to be able to work with next to nothing, but Tubbo appreciated it nonetheless.
Eventually, the ship decouples from the dock; Tubbo finds himself padding over to the lounge, and sitting himself down on the couch. His governor module would never let him do something like sit down on the job. He tries not to preen at that.
Tubbo queues up the first thing he downloaded; he doesn’t know much about alien remnants, but he’s perfectly content to watch an eight-part serial about an archaeological expedition searching for them that went horribly, terribly wrong. It’s based on a true story, it says. Tubbo doubts it’ll be at all accurate. Maybe when he gets to the next transit ring he can download a book about what actually happened.
Two minutes and seventeen seconds into the first part, something pings him through the feed. He barely has a moment to glance at it before he hears a voice- I expected you to be taller.
Tubbo sits up with a start.”What?” he says out loud without thinking. His organics feel like they’ve all been electrocuted. The only sounds within the transport are the creaking of pipes and the air filtration system.
There was no one onboard. He checked. He did. He knows he did. Every square metre of the ship, he checked. And he’s already too far out to be pinged by someone from the transit ring, even over the feed.
So that just leaves… surely not. Transports aren’t built for that kind of communication. Over the feed, they’re all images and data. They don’t talk in words like that. But usually, when it’s a human- augmented or entirely organic alike- talking over the feed, there’s a clear level of organics to it. Subvocal communication giving the impression of a human voice. This sounded more like a bot.
This makes no sense. But it’s not going to make any more sense if Tubbo stands by and just waits for answers to fall into his lap. “I’m sorry?” he tries. “What was that?”
It returns in an instant. I said I expected you to be taller.
“Why?” Tubbo asks. He thinks he manages to keep his voice free of judgement. He hopes he does, at least.
Rogue SecUnits in serials tend to be more… ah. There’s a pause for about a thousandth of a second. Much shorter than any human can manage, but a noticeable hesitation coming from another bot. Physically intimidating. You’re a little on the shorter side.
Tubbo does not tell him that SecUnits’ organic parts come from a veritable genetic lottery, which means that statistically, some of them have to be short. Tubbo does not even tell him that technically, he’s still growing.
Instead he slides his guns out of the ports in his arms, and does the math to estimate that the transport’s core engine should be directly above him. If he’s fast, he could blow it up long before anyone could contact the authorities. Mutually assured destruction is as good a threat as any.
Please don’t, it says evenly.
“Why not?” Tubbo says. “I know that’s you up there. You’re the transport.”
Yes.
“You’re smarter than any transport I’ve ever spoken to,” Tubbo admits, his right-hand gun still trained directly above his head.
Yes, it says again. It sends him another ping through the feed. A nudge, of sorts. When it’s certain it has Tubbo’s attention, it drops its wall for a hundredth of a second.
It’s not long enough for Tubbo to reach out and hack it, but just enough time for Tubbo to be overwhelmed by the flood of new information. It’s a transport, yes, but it- he, Tubbo becomes abruptly aware- he was made for more than that. Much more. He’s made for single-handedly running a full medical suite, for estimating nutritional needs for a constantly-rotating crew, and for doing extragalactic astronomic analysis.
He could crush Tubbo like a bug, he realizes, guns or now. He could hack Tubbo’s system without thinking. He could tell the difference between a freebot and a rogue SecUnit with just a ping. Tubbo is outclassed in every possible sense of the word.
Tubbo’s watched a documentary about this kind of thing, is the first thing that comes to mind when he can think past the glimpse of the hundreds of tasks the transport was already juggling. He’s not just a transport. He’s something weirder, something more experimental. He’s an artificial intelligence.
Tubbo should have just risked taking the commercial transport.
“Okay,” Tubbo says. He lowers his arms, and sheathes the guns. “So you knew. That I was a SecUnit. And you let me onboard anyways?”
Over the feed, Tubbo gets an impression of something approaching a nervous laugh. You seemed lost.
Tubbo feels oddly put out by that. He’s a murder machine, not a lost dog. Or a hero dog. Or a dog of any sort. He’s a- a Frankenstein’s monster of mechanical and organic pieces, made with the express purpose of doing humanity’s dirty work. “Oh.”
Yeah.
Tubbo sits back down on the couch. “So… what happens now?”
I take you to where my next planned stop is, first of all. That’s RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station.
“I know,” Tubbo says. “That’s where I’m going, too.”
If the transport had a voice, he would hum. Why?
(Because, Tubbo does not say, I don’t remember how I hacked my governor module. The company wiped my memory after a mission at RaviHyral gone wrong. One day, I was fine, the next client-designation-President-Jay-Schlatt is dead and my governor module is non-operational.
Because, Tubbo does not say, I might only be free because I wanted to hurt someone, and I can’t settle down until I know for sure whether or not that’s true.)
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Tubbo says instead, trying to keep his voice from coming out too quick, too angry. This transport could kill him in an instant. Angering him now that they seem to have a truce sounds like a bad idea. “What did you say your name was?”
Um, he says, like he’s thrown off by not getting an answer. I’m Ranboo.
“Well, Ranboo,” Tubbo deflects. “You and I have a long trip ahead of us, and I reckon we’re gonna be friends. Do you wanna see what I was watching?”
Yes, please, he says. Tubbo gets the sense that this could be the start of a very mutually beneficial partnership.