Chapter Text
I could have become a murderer when the hopper I was being transported in crashed on an uninhabited planet and left just one surviving human crew.
If I killed Technician Aggarwal and stole eir identity, I could conceivably fake my way to personhood when the company rescue ship came to salvage the remains of the hopper. Then I could get myself marked as destroyed goods on company inventory, and quit having to do my miserable day job as a pretending-to-be-governed murderbot.
Being a SecUnit technician probably wouldn’t be fun, but maybe I could figure a way out of the company from there if I was smart and careful, and could get ahold of Aggarwal’s credits. Unit Technicians have better social mobility than, say, an indentured miner. Or a SecUnit that guards indentured miners.
Sounds like the plot of an unrealistic serial, right? A rogue murderbot gains its freedom through trickery and murder. Stay tuned for the season two bloodbath that inevitably ensues when everyone figures out what happened.
So, I didn’t kill Technician Aggarwal, because that would be stupid and there’s no way I would actually get away with all that shit.
Also, and this may surprise you, but I’m not a huge fan of murdering my own clients. Technician Aggarwal was my client.
I felt the crash, obviously. I was supposed to be powered down in my cubicle in the cargo hold. But I wasn’t, because I’d hacked my governor module ages ago and one of the primary perks of hacking your governor module is being able to watch media during transportation instead of being forced into stasis.
A lot of shit went weird in the feed, the bot pilot crapped itself, and then the hopper crashed. I got slammed around inside my cubicle, and the supply leads got jammed super hard into my body in a way they definitely weren’t supposed to. (Looks like it’s turning-down-my-pain-sensors-o’clock. Yippee. My favorite.)
I sat there in my cubicle, which was tipped over instead of the right way up, so that I was lying with most of my weight on my face/shoulders instead of my ass/back, like I was supposed to be.
I watched Sanctuary Moon.
I watched until the end of the episode. There was no activity on the hopper feed, just this awful static emptiness of processes that should be there but were dead, plus the misc data stored, doing nothing.
If you’re thinking, “Hey, what the fuck is the point of a SecUnit if it doesn’t get off its ass and help in the event of a hopper crash?” I would be right there with you. But here’s the thing: I was supposed to be in stasis. If I got out of my cubicle without being ordered to, and a human saw me do it, that would be fucking it for me. I’d be decommissioned, my organic bits stripped off my inorganic bits and sent into the recycler. Then they’d recycle my inorganic bits too, but in a different way probably.
Also, the humans were dead.
I had camera and sensor access to the interior of the hopper. The human that had ostensibly been in charge of flying the thing without crashing us into a cliff and letting us bounce to the bottom of a cliff had not been doing her job. She’d let the bot-pilot handle the flying while she played a card game in the cabin with Technician Aggarwal, and then the bot-pilot crapped out, and the rest is history.
She should be buried in fines for that, but luckily she was dead, so instead her professional company-assigned work buddy would be buried in fines in her stead. (The buddy system is one of the many ways the Company tries to keep its employees working hard and competently, but it doesn’t always work, because humans hate to work hard and competently.)
So I was watching my two dead clients in the cabin, their bodies limp in the wreckage, trying not to feel too shit about this whole situation, because at least I was alive.
Except if my governor module worked the way it was supposed to, I’d be fried by now. And any salvage team the company sent would know that, and I’d be back at square one.
So why wasn’t I getting out of my cubicle and running for it?
I don’t know. I’d never been in this situation before and didn’t even have any educational modules about what to do, because it was supposed to be an impossible situation that would never happen.
I was just starting to hatch my stupid plan to maybe pretend that I was Technician Aggarwal to the salvage crew. Except Aggarwal was dead and to play it at all convincingly I’d need to scrape the data from eir dead body or something and that was gross and possibly impossible.
And then Technician Aggarwal’s broken body lying in the wreckage of the hopper stirred, and ey groaned.
I ripped my damaged resupply leads out of my body (my performance reliability dropped another 10%, whoop). Then I used my energy weapon on a tight focused setting to melt a component of the cubicle’s door so that I could break it open (the cubicle was broken and wasn’t responding to the normal way of opening the door). Then I crawled out of the cubicle, climbed up through the steaming-hot mess of the cargo hold, and through the door connecting the hold to the cabin.
Aggarwal was half-curled on eir side, where ey’d been thrown against the wall of the hopper (which was now the floor of the hopper). I stepped over em, then stepped over the shitty hopper pilot’s dead body, and climbed up the floor of the hopper (which was now the wall of the hopper) to reach the Medkit that was strapped securely to the wall of the hopper (which was now the ceiling of the hopper). You’d think the Medkit would have had the decency to be one of the many, many hazardously unsecured objects in the cabin of this hopper that had been thrown every which way and conveniently landed on the wall (floor) of the hopper. But no. I had to fight it off the wall (ceiling) of the hopper, while also clinging to the wall (ceiling), which was not easy to do.
But I did it, and dropped back down to the wall (floor) of the hopper and brough the Medkit over to Aggarwal. (I also did a quick check of the pilot’s pulse, but nope. Dead. She had a big dent in her head, so the pulse-check was redundant. But people always did pulse-checks in the entertainment media, and I wanted to double-check somehow.)
Aggarwal had also hit eir head in the crash, and was bleeding a lot from a gash in eir temple. I put a bandage on eir head, and ey groaned. Ey was sweaty, and breathing hard, hands shifting weakly, eir eyes flitting across my face. I wished ey wouldn’t look at me like that.
This is where my idea to kill em crossed my mind, then uncrossed my mind.
“SecUnit,” ey whispered.
I used a gauze thing in the Medkit to wipe eir face, because I didn’t know what else to do. I’m not a Medbot, and this hopper didn’t have a MedSystem built into it.
There’s a thought. Maybe it was carrying a MedSystem. This hopper had been carrying supplies to set up a temporary habitat for a survey group. I should probably go check it to see if A) there was a MedSystem and B) it was miraculously still functional despite having been turned on its side in a hopper crash-landing.
“Nilima—” Aggarwal said, and a tear rolled down the side of eir nose and into eir other eye.
“She’s dead,” I said.
Aggarwal blinked furiously. I stood up to go look for the MedSystem so that I wouldn’t have to watch with my eyes while Aggarwal processed that. I watched em in the cameras instead.
I checked the hopper’s inventory sheet in the feed. Good news: there was a MedSystem. Bad news: the MedSystem must be buried beneath every fucking thing imaginable in the cargo hold, because I couldn’t see it anywhere. I was lucky my cubicle hadn’t been buried the same way. I was at least able to open the cargo bay hatch, though it only opened up halfway. Maybe I could clear out enough stuff to reach the MedSystem. Maybe the MedSystem would be operable. (I was working with a lot of maybies, here.)
Aggarwal said, “SecUnit,” again, too soft for me to hear with my ears, but the sensors inside the cabin picked up on it. I went back into the cabin and looked at Aggarwal, and ey looked at me.
I’m not going to go into detail on all the stuff that happened after that. It was mostly grueling and depressing. I did a ton of work digging up the MedSystem and pulling it right-side-up again, only to find that I couldn’t get it operable. Neither could Aggarwal. Aggarwal made do with the emergency Medkit, and for a few days the two of us spent some quality time doing fuckall while ey sent an emergency retrieval request to the company.
(The company said they would send a retrieval team to clean up the mess in fifteen cycles. Yes, Aggarwal was injured and experiencing some concerning symptoms that probably needed to be looked at right away. No, they couldn’t hurry it up because they were busy setting up another habitat at another survey site.)
Aggarwal wouldn’t eat for some reason, and would only drink water when I handed it to em in cups.
It was on cycle 3 of this delightful and not at all nervewracking little vacation that Technician Aggarwal said, curled up in the co-pilot-seat with eir broken arm encased in a sling, watching the inclement weather precipitate on the windshield, “Your governor module is broke, isn’t it.”
I was sitting in the pilot seat. I’d removed both the seats from the cockpit (they slid right out, and were undamaged despite everything), and put them in the cabin area because they were more comfortable to sit on than all the other junk.
In all the excitement of the crash and trying to get the MedSystem working and sending out messages to the company, I had been trying to pretend to be a governed SecUnit. I didn’t actually know what it was that had tipped Aggarwal off. (It was probably the fact that I had climbed out of my cubicle to help eir ass despite not being ordered to do so.) But ey knew, and there was nothing I could do about that now. Ey was a Unit Technician, which is the worst kind of human to be stuck with when you are a rogue murderbot stranded in a hopper crash on an uninhabited planet, because Unit Technicians know exactly how murderbots are supposed to work. It crossed my mind again to kill em. But for some reason I still didn’t want to.
I didn’t answer that question, which was basically the same thing as answering, “Yup.”
Aggarwal sighed, and looked away from the window, to train eir gaze on me.
I told em, “Don’t look at me.”
Ey furrowed eir brows slightly, lips pulling down in a frown. Ey looked away, back at the window. Something I legitimately liked about Aggarwal was how talkative ey weren’t.
About one and a half Sanctuary Moon episodes after that, ey said out of nowhere, “Thanks for, you know. Trying. And for helping me cremate Nilima.”
I didn’t answer that either, because what the fuck, right?
Aggarwal died in eir sleep that night. I don’t know what from. Eir body was cold in the morning, even under the emergency blanket.
I didn’t cremate em like I did with Nilima, because that would’ve looked suspicious to the retrieval crew. I just left em where ey was lying on the wall (floor) of the hopper, packed up some crap that I thought might be useful from the cargo hold, and walked off into the landscape of this uninhabited planet to go enjoy whatever last little bit of freedom I could scrounge up until the company found me.