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As I always did on Preservation Station, I was running my “react to stimuli like a human” subroutine, so when I heard the crash I whipped my head toward the direction of the noise as I dispatched one of my drones towards the source to investigate. It didn’t sound like projectile or energy weapon fire, which was my first concern. It was a crashing, breaking noise, not an explosion, so unlikely to be an explosive, either.
I reacted to the noise slightly faster than the humans did, so I thought the human-reaction subroutine might need some tweaking. I wondered if humans would notice that sort of discrepancy in reaction speed, or if it was just the kind of thing my paranoid brain thought humans would notice.
Most of the humans also turned to look in the direction of the source of the noise, and a couple, probably juveniles, screamed. My drone, arriving, got me a look at what had happened: a hauler bot, bringing a shipment of frozen food to the mall, had malfunctioned, and one of its arms had gone slack. The load fell from the catwalk track it traversed and hit the floor below, which was why the noise was so loud. Thankfully, the area below the catwalk was fenced off to humans for just this sort of thing, and no bots had been traveling down there to get squashed.
Picking out the hauler bot’s feed out of the web of connections—(I recognized this one, so it was easy) I messaged it: Query: status update
After about .05 seconds, which was a pretty long reply time for a simple status update, it replied.
HB-9123522.q1 Designation “Beany Boy”: Query: left grip inoperable. All other systems clear.
I replied: Query: maintenance due
Another awkward pause.
Beany Boy: Query: maintenance overdue. 15 days.
Beany Boy: :amusement_sigil_19=flushed:
Well, at least it would have to request its maintenance now, since it wouldn’t be able to work until it had maintenance performed.
I turned to Mensah, who I’d been walking home from Bharadwaj’s residence before the event. I said, “Nothing to worry about. A hauler bot headed to the mall malfunctioned and dropped a load from the track, but nobody is hurt.”
That was when I realized how ashen Mensah looked. She’d gone unnaturally still—almost like a SecUnit. I said, “Dr. Mensah?”
She looked at me, and blinked, then swallowed, before saying, “Sorry, what was that SecUnit?” Her voice quavered and she spoke more quietly than usual.
It unnerved me a little bit that she hadn’t caught what I said, because Mensah was usually a human who could I rely on to actually pay attention to what I had said. (It was depressingly rare.) However, I could tell that she was experiencing some level of emotional distress. Her pupils had constricted, and there was a faint tremor in her shoulders.
Carefully, I said, “A hauler bot had a malfunction and dropped a load. No one is hurt.”
Mensah took a deep breath and exhaled it almost immediately. She licked her lips and sounding very much like she was trying to sound normal and unconcerned she said, “Oh. Good.” Then amended that, “Well, not good, but you know.”
She was breathing in and out very quickly, I noted, and there was also a faint sheen of sweat on her brow. I was getting concerned. She was acting like a human who was under threat, but I knew, and threat assessment agreed, that there were no threats. I asked her, “Are you alright?”
“Fine,” she answered quickly.
I didn’t know what to do. I said, “Let’s keep going,” and turned to continue back to the administrative center. I watched Mensah through a drone, and after hesitating a moment, she started to walk, and I kept pace with her. She still wasn’t quite right, her steps a little unsteady and her breath too quick and shallow.
I thought that this had to be a trauma response, and felt not only frustrated, but useless. Mensah needed to go to trauma treatment, and even though she had promised me she would after the festival, she kept pushing back the start date, and now she was waiting until after I left for the survey trip with Arada. I almost didn’t trust her to actually go to the first meeting without me there to shepherd her, which I knew wasn’t fair, but I was still worried about it.
I wished I knew how to help. The retrieved client protocol, in its entirety, only directed me to bring Mensah to the nearest MedSystem for trauma treatment. I’d been trying to do that for months now. The problem was only going to keep getting worse.
As we walked, I pulled my drones view around, so I could get a look at her face. Real human expressions are usually still difficult to read, but I could tell what this one was: undirected terror. This was a human expression I had a lot of experience with, even before I hacked my governor module. She was still paler than usual. She was clearly clenching her jaw, her lips pulled thin, and she was blinking too often. I thought she was probably blinking to try to keep from crying. It was disconcerting—humans cried all the time in the media, but my humans never did it in front of me. I guess they preferred to hide it.
I was grateful that they usually didn’t do it in front of me because I had absolutely no idea what to do with a crying human. Much less a crying Mensah. A crying Mensah who was trying to hide being a crying Mensah.
I had no alternative options coming up, so I tried something that I knew had calmed Mensah down when she was frightened before: I took her hand. Since I wasn’t focused on keeping us alive, I had a lot more attention that I could pay to it. Mensah’s hand felt a little too cold. It was also slightly damp from her increased sweat output. I could feel her pulse through her palm, and I didn’t like how high it was. It was awkward holding another hand. My hand was a lot bigger than hers, the tips of her fingers just reaching the second knuckle on mine. But then Mensah twined her fingers with mine, and squeezed, and suddenly I realized I didn’t want to jump out of my skin entirely.
I made a snap decision and changed course. I knew there were sets of private sitting rooms nearby in the atrium that were used as meeting spaces or workspaces. Tugging Mensah along, I brought us to the closest open one, booked it via the feed, and brought her inside. I engaged the privacy filters and the glass walls frosted.
Mensah sunk into the couch as soon as were inside. She still held my hand, and I had to bend over a little bit to accommodate that. I didn’t know what to do, and I hated that, but I had to ask, because I didn’t want to fuck it up. I said, “What do you need?”
Mensah let out a shuddering breath. Now that we were in private, it seemed she couldn’t control her tears anymore. A couple tear tracks had already streaked down her cheeks. Her voice was choked and hoarse as she said, “I’m sorry, SecUnit.”
I bent my knees and squatted, so I wouldn’t be looming over her. Even though she trusted me, that could still be intimidating. The last thing she needed now was for me to frighten her, even I could figure that out. I said, “There’s nothing to be sorry about.” I was looking at her, but not really looking at her, because I was actually paying attention to my drone’s visual stream, and not the one from my eyes. Her shoulders were shaking. I said, “What can I do to help?”
Her voice cracked, and she said, “Would you just sit next to me?”
“Okay,” I said. I sat down at her side without letting go of her hand. I left a little space in between our bodies.
Mensah started shifting as soon as I sat down, looking at the side of my face. Hesitantly, she said, “Can I…” then trailed off without actually saying what she wanted.
I had a pretty good idea what she wanted.
I wanted to say no. If Mensah hadn’t been having a crisis, I probably would’ve said no. But I realized that I wanted Mensah to calm down and feel secure more than I wanted not to be touched, so I said, “Yes.”
Mensah scooted closer on the couch, closing the distance between our legs. She pulled our hands into her lap, clutching my hand tightly. Then she leaned her body against mine and rested her head on my shoulder.
I had seen humans sit together like this, on my serials. I had never imagined doing it myself. I could feel Mensah’s body shivering against mine. I upped my body heat. I asked, “Should I… talk?”
“No,” Mensah said. “This helps.”
So, while we sat and I waited for Mensah’s breathing to normalize and her trembling to stop, I looked up the symptoms I had observed in the feed. I was pretty sure that she was experiencing something called a panic attack. It was like a misdirected human defense mechanism that happened when a human had nothing to defend themselves against, I guess. It could be a symptom of trauma sometimes, but other times they happened without a specific trigger. I wondered which it was for Mensah.
I read about the psychological symptoms even though I couldn’t tell what Mensah was thinking. I couldn’t experience most of the physical effects, because my body was so different from a human’s, but as I read about the psychological symptoms of panic attacks, I wondered if the terror and anxiety I had felt aboard the gunship, before the viral attack happened, was the SecUnit version of one.
Mensah stopped trembling.
“Are you okay?” I asked softly.
“It’s done, I think.” Mensah took her head off my shoulder and leaned forward, crossing her arms over her knees and resting her forehead on them. “That was exhausting.”
“It looked exhausting.”
She chuckled at that, and then was quiet for a moment. She said, “I’m sorry SecUnit. I know that… you don’t like to be touched. My behavior was inappropriate.”
I said, “I initiated the contact,” because I thought that it was important context. Then I said, “And I consented to the rest of it. It’s not like you didn’t ask.”
“But I’m sure you felt pressured,” Mensah said miserably. Her shoulders shook a little, and again, I felt arrested by the feeling of helplessness, of not knowing what to do. I wanted Mensah to feel better, to be okay.
“I wanted to help you feel better,” I said. “I wouldn’t have let anyone else do that.”
“I didn’t mean to take advantage of you.”
“You didn’t.”
“It still feels wrong.”
I puzzled over it for a minute. I said, “Physical contact doesn’t comfort me, like it does for you.” Mensah turned her head enough to peek at me out of the corner of her eye. “But I liked that you felt safe enough with me to want that. I thought it was what you needed.” I was quiet for a moment. “You want me to be free, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she said, her voice still a little high and shaky.
“Being free means choosing to do things because I want to. I wanted to be there for you.”
We were quiet for a moment. I wanted to tell her she needed to do the trauma treatment, but it didn’t feel like the right time. I stood up, and my hand finally slipped from Mensah’s. I asked, “Do you think you’re ready to go home?”
She took a deep breath and nodded. I opened the door.