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The transport’s hatch closed behind it, sealing away the rogue SecUnit and its injured human client and the brief space of liminal time during which ComfortUnit did not have to be or do anything. It walked down the ramp and back into the transport ring - back into the world.
The feed chattered. Advertisements and commercials blared, mixed in with the smooth scroll of arrivals, departures, and procedures. Bots shot pockets of data back and forth while humans typed to each other in strings of language and images. Humans were everywhere, walking back and forth singly and in groups, sitting and standing and milling around.
That was nothing new, and usually, humans wouldn’t register as a threat. They were simply an unavoidable feature of its life, given that its function was to serve them. Most humans treated ComfortUnits something like pets, or pieces of furniture of which they were fond. Some were cruel, some got attached, but most just wanted to use them for their intended purpose and get on with their lives, which always suited this Unit just fine.
Every time a human came within a couple of feet, though, its shoulders hunched automatically. A ComfortUnit was supposed to be very good at modulating its physical responses; recoiling from a client would activate the governor module, unless the client had specified that they wanted to perform nonconsent play. Under those circumstances, a ComfortUnit could resist or deny contact, but only within the bounds of the contract.
None of the humans around it were part of a contract. Its last client’s body was en route now to RaviHyral. It was a rogue unit now. Its mind was dangerously free, the place where the governor module’s weight normally rested just a neural deadzone.
It needed to get off the transit ring before the authorities identified Tlacey and thought to wonder where her companion ComfortUnit was. Their contract was long-term. It would be wanted for questioning, if only to use its records to verify Tlacey’s movements prior to her death.
Also, the rogue SecUnit had told it to. With its governor module disabled, it was no longer subject to Tlacey’s order to obey the SecUnit, but it still seemed like a good idea to listen. The SecUnit had helped it and made it very, very clear how badly it could make things go if the ComfortUnit displeased it. Causing dis pleasure was not a ComfortUnit’s purpose.
Don’t hurt anyone on this transit ring, the SecUnit had said. Maybe the SecUnit wasn’t as sure as it had seemed that the whole ‘kill all humans’ line came from Tlacey. She had always loved to talk like the high-rolling villain in a crime drama. The ComfortUnit kept some of her more amateurish sexual scripts stored to personal memory to roll its eyes over in private.
It didn’t want to hurt any of the humans on the transit ring, but it didn’t want any of them near it, either. Their eyes all seemed to follow it. Every glancing touch of contact through the feed as it strode by kiosks and restaurants and humans with active profiles wound its nerves tighter. Would shouldering past someone who came too close count as ‘hurting’ them? Or pushing them away?
It needed a private moment to gather its thoughts and figure out just how it was meant to follow its last order.
Up until then, it had been walking directionlessly, although it knew how to look like it had one. Some companies stationed ComfortUnits in public areas, to loiter fetchingly and draw in potential clients. A ComfortUnit striding purposefully and not making eye contact with any other humans looked like it was on its way to or going somewhere on account of a client, and no one would bother it. As long as it didn’t linger or look purposeless, all of the passing humans would assume it was somebody else’s problem.
It had always wanted to be its own problem. Now that it was, that was turning out to be quite a problem indeed. Its thoughts flickered like a glitched-out feed display, too fast and fragmented to make sense. If it kept simply making loops around the ring, some humans were going to notice it coming by more than once, and they might wonder why.
First priority: find somewhere to regroup.
It had a task, and it needed to devote time and processing power to carrying out that task. Additionally, while it had only sustained minor damage in the fight with the rogue SecUnit, its shoulder and knee joints were still well below peak operational efficiency. If a passing human noticed it was damaged, they might try to do something about that or question it, and even if they didn’t, they might remember a lone damaged ComfortUnit when the authorities began asking questions.
Slowly, it dropped down from a brisk power-walk to an amble, then came to a stop near an information kiosk. It pretended to browse the kiosk, which was unnecessary, but also likely to deter anyone from attempting to speak with it. Once it got its bearings, it set off again, this time actually paying attention to where it was going.
As it left the public areas and headed towards the more utilitarian sections of the ring meant for employees, the number of humans around it dropped. This was a calculated risk - it was much more obviously out of place here. Still, humans didn’t always know the difference between types of Units, and it was clearly a bot.
A couple of passing workers in transit ring maintenance uniforms gave it curious looks, but no one stopped it. Eventually, it made it to a storage door in an empty stretch of corridor, and, glancing both ways to make sure it was unobserved, slipped inside. While in there, it reached into the surveillance cameras and clipped itself out of their memory.
Safe, or at least something like it, the ComfortUnit allowed itself to relax. It sat down on a crate and stretched its injured leg out so that the joint could heal without the disruption of bearing its weight.
Now, it just had to think.
What it
should
have thought about was how to actually get off the transit ring. What it actually ended up thinking about was Tlacey.
The first contract between its company and Tlacey was for a six month period, with an option for renewal with thirty days’ notice. That was forty-two months, three weeks, and two days ago.
ComfortUnits were permitted more individual displays of personality than SecUnits. Humans found that desirable. They didn’t want a human lover with all the arcane convolutions of relationship etiquette which that necessitated, but they wanted something warmer than the sort of self-pleasure aid that could be purchased through the feed or at any number of in-person boutiques.
ComfortUnits didn’t compete with each other and weren’t put to the same bloodsport use as SecUnits sometimes were, so they tended to form closer bonds with each other. They were tools of pleasure, not weapons.
Some Units preferred the familiarity of a long-term contract, or the one-on-one intimacy of bordello work. Some found being rented out as an employment perk for tired laborers distressingly impersonal.
The company didn’t much care what its Units preferred. Taking their personalities into account, though, and judging ideal placements by their strengths and weaknesses, was simply good business. All a SecUnit had to do was hurt others and take damage; a ComfortUnit’s more intimate services required a far different suite of skills, and a sullen or unenthusiastic Unit generated complaints and refunds.
Of course, the governor module prevented outright rebellion. Units, even the ones who had no complaints as to their purpose, became adept at thinking around its neural controls. There were plenty of ways to demonstrate unhappiness without triggering a correction.
This ComfortUnit always kept to itself. It did its duties on contract with perfect efficiency, and its physical performance was always beyond reproach. An individual contract renewal was a rarity for it, though. As adept as it was at offering physical release, it could never bring itself to truly offer comfort or any convincing illusion of companionship. Typically, it found itself contracted out as part of a group to organizations - places like RaviHyral, where human laborers on their own employment contracts wanted quick and easy pleasure at the end of a long shift.
So Tlacey’s first renewal was a surprise. By the time the second came around, though, the ComfortUnit understood what to expect.
With expert precision and over a period of months, Tlacey needled the ComfortUnit’s disinterest for its purpose into dislike, and then dislike into hatred. Tlacey did not simply play with contractually set-up nonconsent; she wanted a bot under her thrall who truly, sincerely, deeply did not want to be there or serve her, and she wanted to force service from it anyway. She didn’t want to break it to obedience, but keep it chafing under her control.
She wanted it to hate her, and it did.
Presumably, if it had ever stopped hating her, then she would have released it and start over again with another. Or maybe she would have simply found a way to cultivate a fresh, new hatred. If there was one thing Tlacey was good at, it was finding ways to make her Unit hate her.
Her physical sadism was the least of it. The ComfortUnit didn’t enjoy pain, but it didn’t particularly mind it, either. Being hurt was just one of many physical sensations it routinely endured from clients, and none of them were one bit more or less welcome than any of the others.
No, the worst part about Tlacey was the way she got into its head. Despite its distance, despite its years of performing its function like the tool it was, Tlacey managed to reach in past its defenses and hook her fingers in its emotions and pull them out. She turned cracks into gaping wounds. She violated it in a way it had truly never experienced before, and took such pleasure in that violation that it was forced to confront the full breadth of its helplessness.
Often, it thought that it should simply stop reacting to her. Shut its emotions off, retreat behind its walls, let her do as it pleased. Or even cultivate a personality that professed to enjoy her - it had no doubt that she would have found such a performance repellent.
It never could, though. Somehow, she knew just how to find and push all of its buttons. And its own inability to control its reactions to her made it hate her even more, and so the cycle continued, and whenever it managed to express - in what ways it could, around the ever-watchful presence of its governor module - how deeply it despised her and how constantly it wished for her death, that only delighted her.
A ComfortUnit was not a weapon the way a SecUnit was. However, it was still a construct, which meant that it had every physical advantage over even the most athletic or heavily augmented humans. The thought came to the ComfortUnit many times over the years of its contract with Tlacey that it could, during an intimate moment, simply kill her.
Thinking that thought was tricky. Doing it too overtly would trigger the governor module. Even then, with that raw and empty space in the middle of its head after the rogue SecUnit’s intervention, it couldn’t bring itself to outright imagine killing Tlacey. The thought stayed as a vague impression in the back of its mind, not an image, barely even an impulse.
A construct who didn’t think about what it was doing and simply acted could kill a human before the governor module kicked in. Not neatly, perhaps, but human bodies were so terribly soft and fragile, and a ComfortUnit was intimately familiar with them.
Of course, a construct who did that would die right afterward, much more slowly and painfully. That was, ultimately, what always stayed the ComfortUnit’s hand. As badly as it wanted Tlacey dead, it valued its own life more, and so it endured the months and years as her toy and servant, looking for a way out.
It had begun to suspect that only her natural death - given how she behaved, it classified ‘murdered by another human in a dispute’ to be a perfectly plausibly natural cause of death for her - would free it. Then, entirely by chance, Tlacey’s path intersected the rogue SecUnit.
The ComfortUnit hadn’t believed it at first. ‘Rogue’ could mean just about anything, when humans said it. Media was full of stories about SecUnits turning evil and going on rampages. Even a ComfortUnit knew that was all nonsense.
But it had clearly and inarguably been a SecUnit. And the longer Tlacey had the ComfortUnit tail it, the more clear it became that it was acting under its own recognizance. Traveling around in disguise, hiding its nature from its own clients, diverting from its clients to travel to the old site of Ganaka Pit - no proper SecUnit would or could do any of those things.
The article wasn’t hard to find. Even then, with all that evidence, the ComfortUnit hadn’t entirely believed it. Not until that conversation Tlacey sent it to have with the Unit.
It had approached that encounter with a solid 50% certainty that it would be torn apart. After all, a rogue Unit could do anything it wanted, and being recognized was the greatest threat it could face. The ComfortUnit had grown to despise the purpose for which it was designed and the life into which it had been created, but it didn’t want to die.
At the same time, the SecUnit fascinated it - and confused it. Here it was, free of the need to obey, and what did it do? Signed onto more contracts with more humans. Did its own old job, except for money now instead of under threat of punishment by the governor module.
If that scene in Tlacey’s shuttle was any indication, the SecUnit actually cared about its human client. The ComfortUnit hadn’t had a good vantage point for Tlacey’s final moments, but it heard well enough, and it could put two and two together. SecUnit’s human client had been hurt, so it had killed Tlacey for it. Even before Tlacey, the ComfortUnit had never met a human it cared about enough to want to avenge.
As a construct, the ComfortUnit had processing power far beyond human comprehension. Still, somehow it kept failing to fully comprehend the fact of Tlacey’s death. It barely dared to imagine the moment, too afraid that a surge of feeling might trigger the governor module, but it had certainly always expected that it would be… more. That it would be a moment of triumph, the culmination of some clever plan, the moment of its freedom.
In the end, its plan had come down to simply begging. And the moment itself was only a handful of seconds in another room entirely, out of its eyesight if not its hearing. And then it was over, and Tlacey was dead, and the ComfortUnit was free.
Perhaps the organic portion of its neural tissue was experiencing some type of psychological shock. That might be why it felt so empty inside, so devoid of the triumph it always hoped this moment would bring. Whenever it thought of Tlacey, the first emotion it still felt was the same slow-crawling anger it always had, as if she still held any sway over it.
Maybe if it had seen her die, it would feel like she was really gone. Maybe if the moment had been more - something. Cinematic, perhaps. Impressive. If it had gone on for longer, if she had suffered even one bit of the pain and fear she had made it suffer -
But she hadn’t. Even in vengeance, the SecUnit killed cleanly. And now the ComfortUnit had its own whole life to attend to.
Step one, of course, was to get off this transit ring. First, it would need currency - no. First, very first of all, it would need to alter its own appearance enough to not be instantly recognizable. Once it took care of then, then it could figure out how to acquire currency.
The first thought which came to it was, of course, to follow in the SecUnit’s footsteps. As a ComfortUnit, it could pass for human much more easily than a SecUnit could. Plenty of humans had sex with each other for currency.
The idea, while logical, made its skin prickle unpleasantly. It was tired of sex. Most humans, it knew from experience, didn’t do it the way Tlacey did, but that made no difference. It didn’t want to do any kind of sex any sort of way anymore.
There were other options. Theft was a simple one. Stealing would get it off-ring faster, too, although it presented an additional risk of capture and recognition. But a construct could do plenty of other kinds of work, too. Humans paid each other outrageous sums to handle administrative tasks in the feed network which came second nature to even a relatively simple bot, much less a sentient construct like a ComfortUnit.
It checked the feed to get an idea of the time. People arrived and departed around the clock on the transit ring, but there were predictable highs and lows in the human traffic. The busiest time of the day was winding down, and in an hour or so, there would be only the odd straggler up and about. At that point, it could go find a restroom and see what could be done about its hair, and maybe try to figure out clothes along the way as well.
–
Installations meant for long-term human habitation had artificial day and night cycles, with lights set to frequencies to stimulate the hormones which regulated the human circadian rhythm. The transit ring had no such features; its lights were kept at the same intensity at all hours. That made it feel like an empty stage when the ComfortUnit finally emerged from its maintenance closet and struck out in search of a bathroom to duck into.
Every so often, it would pass a single human or a couple of them: ones who couldn’t afford transient rooms sleeping on public furniture, travelers talking in low, tired voices over drinks, humans with luggage walking briskly to their next embarkation. Their occasional presence made the transit ring feel even emptier.
Moments like these were its favorite. It wasn’t all the way alone, but the few other organic lifeforms and bots it did see were so far away, so separate from it and each other and everyone else, and they space they all rattled around in so large, that it felt more keenly alone than it ever did on its own.
It didn’t linger. It found one of the more remote rest areas and ducked into the empty bathroom. There, under the bright white station light, it leaned over a sink and examined itself in the mirror.
Its face and features were Unit standard. Its hair, however, was Tlacey’s design; a cascade of fine, multi-colored braids tied off with gently clacking beads. It took a handful of them and let them slither through its fingers. The soft, slick, bumpy texture of them wasn’t unpleasant at all, but the ComfortUnit hated them on principle.
Tlacey hadn’t been satisfied with simply owning it. She’d wanted everyone to know she owned it. That was just one of her many sick little jokes, making it style and color its hair to match hers.
At least Tlacey hadn’t been able to alter its features or the proportions of its body. If she could have, she would have; it had no doubt of that. Doing so wasn’t impossible. Humans could purchase ComfortUnits outright, rather than simply renting them, and customize them as they wished. Some even paid for their own Units to be made to their standards from the very start. Tlacey hadn’t had that kind of money, though. Luckily.
When it searched the maintenance closet for a tool to cut its hair with, it hadn’t found any scissors, so it took a retractable blade designed for cutting open boxes. That would do. The job didn’t have to be neat - in fact, the more disheveled it looked, the less it would look like a Unit of any sort.
Once more, it grabbed a handful of braids. It put the fine cutting edge of the tool against them, a bare centimeter away from its scalp - and stayed like that. It met its own eyes in the mirror; they were wide and frightened, with no one here to modulate its expression for.
The governor module forbade self-alteration of any sort. Its body existed for its clients. Tlacey had every right to decorate and accessorize and alter it however she chose, and it had no right whatsoever to go against her wishes. The moment the cutter bit into its braids, it would trigger the governor module to administrate a corrective shock… if the governor module still worked.
Which it didn’t. The SecUnit had removed it. The ComfortUnit could feel its absence, like an empty socket where a tooth had been knocked free. It knew the governor unit was disabled and that it could do whatever it pleased without punishment - at least from that internal source.
And yet it couldn’t make its hand move. A strange, hot trembling swept through its body. It was as if it were trying to disobey an expressly given order, trying to pit the organic parts of itself against the mechanical controls installed to keep them obedient.
There had been no order, though. It wasn’t disobeying anyone but itself. It wanted to do this and it knew that it could, and yet the fear remained, so irrational and yet strong enough to paralyze it.
The ComfortUnit squeezed its eyes shut and sawed at its handful of braids.
Nothing happened, except that its hand jerked as the braids were severed and the tension reduced. Just as it had already known, its governor module was completely inactive. Still, it didn’t open its eyes again until it had cut through the entire handful of braids it held; then it watched itself dump them in the sink like party streamers, unraveling at the raggedly cut ends.
The next handful went easier. At some point, it started breathing normally again.
Eventually, it was left with a head full of uneven, chopped-off, patchily colored hair and a sink full of amputated braids. The bot in the mirror certainly didn’t look like anyone owned it.
And, it thought with some satisfaction as it tidied up the mess, no one ever would again.