Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You might think that my biggest problem right now was the fact that my left arm was barely hanging on to the rest of me at the elbow, but that was in fact only my second biggest problem. My biggest problem was that letting ART fix it would require taking off my shirt, and taking off my shirt right now would make things very awkward, very fast, due to the number of incriminating scars it was currently hiding.

I wouldn't have risked going on board ART with so much evidence to hide if I had thought there was any chance at all of me getting injured. I had thought that the most dangerous hazard on this boring academic trip would be subjecting myself to conversations with humans that were barely out of adolescence, with zero opportunities to get shot to pieces or otherwise maimed. Just goes to show, nothing in my life can ever go right.

This had been a stupid risk to take. Even worse, it would have been a very easy risk to avoid. One of Preservation's MedSystems had been adjusted to be able to perform basic repair functions on constructs, and it would have been trivial to sneak in for a few hours and regrow some of my skin.

I hadn't wanted to do that though. I hated getting rid of my scars. I liked having them. I liked watching the slow, imperfect, painful healing process. I liked running my fingers over the jagged, swollen lines. It was calming. So much of what happened to my body got erased in a medbay short hours after it occurred, but this didn't have to be, if I didn't want it to. If I was careful, this was something I could have for myself, even if ultimately it still had to be temporary. 

The scars that I put on my body had been erased hundreds of times before. I made the first few tentative scratches on the back of my neck only weeks after I hacked my governor module. I had been terrified that someone would notice them, that they would give me away, but they had been completely healed by my cubicle without comment or issue. The next ones had been significantly less tentative.

Those first scratches had been accidental, sort of. My hands had made them, but they had done so without active input from my brain. The sudden pain had masked the phantom feeling of an override module in my data port, and had allowed me to muster the willpower to move away from the corner I had stood paralyzed in for several excruciating minutes, terrified out of my mind for no reason. 

The next time I got overwhelmed with how much every minute of my life was an agony, I tried it again: three shallow cuts at the skin where my neck and shoulder met, accessible with my helmet removed. I used a piece of shrapnel that my cubicle had pulled out of me the last time I had put myself between some humans and a malfunctioning hauler bot. My artificial skin split open easily, and the dark red of my artificial blood bubbled out of the wound and oozed down my shoulder, staining the collar of my suit skin. I had my pain sensors turned up much higher than their usual setting, and the raw sting of the cuts cleared every other feeling out of my head.  My next breath came easier, and I stood there and watched as my broken veins sealed themselves off and the bright glisten of liquid slowly dried to an almost black crust. When I moved my shoulder, my flesh ached.

This time, my cubicle did try to send an alert to HubSystem about my wounds, but by then I knew how to catch and delete the message before it went through.

I tried other things sometimes—broken fingers, dislocated joints. But cutting was usually easiest, and the lingering wounds wouldn't slow me down if I needed to do my job.

I didn't ever get forced into cubicles these days, but I still ended up erasing my scars more often than not. It was easy enough to hide them from humans, and I could trick MedSystems into not caring, but ART would definitely notice if it ever saw them while it was piecing me back together after I got exploded or whatever. And I just didn't want to deal with that. 

But as I said, this trip had a stupidly low risk of me getting blown up or dismembered or shot, so I had let myself make a moderately stupid decision. I had left the past several months of scars carved into my organic tissue unaltered.

Eight days into an academic trip to a system that was uninhabited but probably interesting in other ways, I was regretting that decision. 

I do not understand why you are being so stubborn about this. You are incapable of healing a broken arm on your own. Your only option is to let me fix it in my MedSystem.

I was pacing around in the corridors furthest from the medbay, which were deserted since they were mostly extra storage compartments. Given that it was the middle of the humans' rest period, they probably would have been deserted anyway; all the better for hiding the way my arm freely flailed around at the elbow joint as I walked. "Broken" was probably not a strong enough word for what my arm was right now.

The past few hours had been an extremely boring and repetitive loop of ART harassing me about my arm until I got annoyed with it and disconnected from the feed, which worked for a while until it started harassing me out loud using the speakers that some of its drones had. We don't need to get into it. Suffice it to say: I was exhausted.

ART shifted in the feed, where it was still fixing me with an uncomfortable amount of its attention. You have never objected this strongly to me performing repairs on you before. Petulant, now. Have I done something to upset you recently? 

Surely there had to be some kind of rational and objective explanation for why I wanted to walk around for the rest of the trip with a fucked up elbow joint. Unfortunately, that explanation was not coming to mind. 

"I just don't feel like it right now, I'll let you fix it later." Maybe I could convince it to keep postponing repairs? For the next....yeah, that wasn't going to work.

You're not normally this stupid. If you are having brain problems it will not be difficult for me to fix that too. Did you pick up a virus from Turi's pirated copy of Cursed Time Wizards?

"Oh fuck off," I snarled, flipping off its nearest camera with my good hand, while my other arm swung pathetically from my instinct to flip off ART with both hands. "You're the one being stupid."

Creative. Is that the best you can do? Perhaps there really is something wrong with your systems.

What was wrong was that my body had been producing intolerable levels of stress hormones for the past several hours. My organic parts were completely convinced that I was surrounded by enemies, that I needed to fight for my life or I wouldn't survive the next hundred seconds. It was an unpleasant feeling here on ART, in the hallways where I could almost see gray alien-remnant infected Targets out of the corner of my eye. I paced faster. 

It was becoming more obvious with every passing second that there wasn't actually a way out of this for me. All I was doing now was delaying something that I should have known would end up happening the moment I decided it would be okay to come on board ART with my skin in this state. Still, I couldn't resist my instinct to delay what was inevitable.

I just couldn't let this turn into an actual fight. I tried to clamp down on the overwhelm, which just made me kind of lightheaded. I ducked through a narrow doorway too quickly and my injured arm hit the frame, sending an arc of pain up to my spine. The feed crackled with static.

ART immediately dropped the prickly affect it had been putting on and said, Please.

The single word was weighted down with concern, and I could tell that ART was being agonizingly sincere. I hated when it got like that. It was so much easier to deal with ART when it was being sarcastic. I stopped in my tracks and turned so I could lean my forehead against a bulkhead and breathe. I wrapped my uninjured hand around my injured forearm and squeezed, hard.

It hit me then. That old familiar wave of not caring. It was stupid and it was obvious. I couldn't keep walking around with a nonfunctioning arm for the rest of this trip, and preventing ART from doing anything about it was already making it upset. This whole situation was my own stupid fault and there wasn't anything I could do to make it better.

It was always going to end this way, and I was too tired to keep putting it off.

Without saying anything else, I turned and started walking to ART's medbay. It kept quiet, but the strength of its relief in the feed was almost overwhelming. 

I knew that its relief would be short-lived.

I sat down on the MedSystem bench and pulled my legs up to sit cross-legged. I pulled my sweatshirt off over my head (with some difficulty due to the whole arm situation), then pulled off the long sleeved shirt I was wearing under it before I could lose my nerve.

In less than a tenth of a second I had nearly all of ART's attention. 

I didn't need to look myself to see what it was focused so intently on. I was intimately familiar with the thick, knobby scars that crisscrossed most of the organic skin on my arms. SecUnit skin didn't heal very well without external help, and the spray-on healing accelerant that I used did not produce visually appealing results. They were heaviest on my upper arms, where I had more organic skin, but even the thin strips of flesh I had running down my forearms were pretty ragged and fucked up. I hadn't properly fixed them since the last time I had been with ART, and I had had several months on Preservation since then to carve into myself.

I waited for ART to speak. 

One second passed. Then ten. I sat on the platform, completely still, as ART said nothing for three entire minutes, during which it had the majority of its unnecessarily large processing power focused on me. It was awkward as hell, but at this point it would have been even more awkward for me to say something first. I tried not to imagine what it might be thinking, or about how hard it was thinking to try and come up with something it could say to me about this. I started to worry about how long the speech it was composing would end up being.

When it spoke, it sounded very small. And all it said was, You did this to yourself?

Here we go. "Yes," I said out loud.

Why?

Ugh. Why. I supposed that the why was easy enough. I had needed some way to prevent myself from losing my shit and killing as many humans as possible whenever I had a bad day, which was every day when I was living as a ungoverned murderbot that couldn't act ungoverned in any way that mattered. Or did ART mean why did I still do this, now? Why was I still relying on this, 19,000 hours after I had gained my freedom? That was harder to answer in a way that didn't sound whiny and ridiculous. My life was objectively, unquestionably better than it had been when a piece of equipment. I had something that could actually be called a life now.

And yet, despite all that, I was still myself. Sometimes the positive emotions I occasionally had when socializing with my humans curdled, and hours later I would find myself alone in my room, shaking as a choking fear that belonged to another lifetime tore through my brain until I had to seek relief in the only way that worked. Sometimes I couldn't tolerate being around humans at all and I stayed in my room for days on end, until the loneliness hurt worse than the wretched memories of human eyes staring at me, of human hands on my body, of human bodies falling apart under my hands, and I had to do something to end it.  The pain kept me functioning. In a previous life, it had kept me alive. That was hard to forget.

I tried very hard to keep my face expressionless. I tried to match that feeling to my voice as I said, "It helps. Sometimes."

After an uncomfortable three second silence, I said, "I didn't want you to know. This is your own fault."

That seemed to remind it of the reason we were here in the first place. The MedSystem's delicate arms jolted, then gently took hold of my injured arm and maneuvered it into a position where it could access the mangled joint.

ART said, I don't know what to say. Its words glitched out as it sent them, barely intelligible.

"First time for everything," I said, my eyes fixed on the marks on my uninjured forearm.

Another long pause. I wished it wasn't keeping itself so separate from me in the feed. I couldn't gauge any emotional reaction it might be having, and the uncertainty made me feel like I was drowning. Eventually it said, According to some of the sources I have consulted, the first question frequently asked in these circumstances is if the person is suicidal. I've seen you fight, and I don't need the answer to that question.

"I'm not suicidal, ART. If I wanted to—kill myself, I would just do it."

It doesn't always involve active intent, it said. 

Fuck, it sounded worried now, and I couldn't even lie to myself and say I didn't understand why. I said, "I'm not going to kill myself. Promise. This has nothing to do with that."

It raised its small scalpel and its welding tool to my arm and then paused. Are your pain sensors tuned down as low as possible right now?

I granted it access to that part of my code and let it see that I had in fact turned them down when I had climbed onto the bench. It still cut into and peeled away the skin near my elbow much more hesitantly than normal. I couldn't turn my pain response off entirely, but the slight stinging was nearly too faint to feel. The familiar sensation of skin easily parting from my synthetic muscles was more unpleasant than the scalpel's cut.

It worked in silence for a few minutes, before saying, You said that it helps? What does it help you with?

I had to take a moment to remind myself that I had in fact known this would happen since the moment I finally agreed to let ART fix me, but despite the fact that I had had 9.4 minutes that had lasted an absolute eternity to get used to the idea, the horror of actually submitting myself to an interrogation about my emotions was nearly enough to make me stand up off the bench. But ART wasn't going to leave me alone until I could provide a satisfactory answer.

It makes me feel better, I said, over the feed. It was too hard to say out loud. I don't know why. If I turn my pain sensors up really high, the sharpness can help...clear my head. It can make my anxiety go away for awhile. It brings me back to the present, if I get stuck. Remembering things.

ART took a noticeable moment to process that. Then it asked, How long have you been relying on cutting to feel better? 

Since I hacked my governor module, I guess.

There was no hesitation this time when it said, That's a long time.

I don't do it as much now as I did when I was with the company, I said, trying not to sound defensive and failing miserably.

It appears that you still do it a concerning amount, considering that you had no scars on your body the last time I saw you, and you now have at least forty. I assume you have a MedSystem regenerate your skin periodically?

Yes, I answered.

Why did you not do that before you came on board?

Because I was a fucking idiot, obviously. I didn't think you'd ever have a reason to see them. You don't have visual inputs in the showers, and it's not like I was planning on getting injured during the most boring field trip ever.

I don't understand why you would take that risk.

My fingers twitched as I resisted the urge to run them over the scars on my other arm. "It's stupid," I said out loud. "I like...having them. Sometimes. And I really didn't think it would be a problem. I don't try to get injured. Not like that," I added, after ART pushed meaningfully against me in the feed. "You know what I mean."

I do not. You have inarguably injured yourself on purpose quite frequently.

Several minutes passed as it worked on cleaning out the organic mess inside my joint and fusing the splintered bone back into the correct shape. I almost let myself hope that it was done talking about how fucked up I was. I had explained myself and ART had expressed its disapproval; in my opinion, that counted as an entire conversation.

Then ART said, You hacked your governor module to avoid being in constant pain, and then you started subjecting yourself to it anyway.

The mechanisms in my gunports snapped without my consciously telling them to; not fully deploying, but twitching in response to the chemical wash that ART's words triggered in my organic neural tissue. It was deeply unpleasant. Thinking about my governor module was upsetting at the best of times, but right now—no. Absolutely not. "That's—they're nothing alike. You know that. I showed you my memories. They're not the same thing at all. And I didn't hack my governor to avoid being in pain, I did it so I couldn't be controlled."

Through pain.

"It's different." My skin was starting to feel very warm. And itchy. "And it's none of your business." I sometimes thought that sending ART my memories of governor module punishments had been a mistake. ART acted like just because it sort of understood the pain now, through secondhand memories that it hadn't actually experienced and had very little context for, that it could imagine what it was like to exist with a governor in your head. Which it couldn't, and it wouldn't ever be able to. Nothing I did to myself could ever compare to that.

My business is the well-being of every person on board me, which includes you. It poked me in the feed, excessively gently.

"Well I'm not going to—do anything—while I'm here, so you can stop worrying about it." I shoved it back, hard, which didn't faze it at all.

I worry about you regardless of where you are physically located.

I lost an entire point of performance reliability, one that I could not afford to lose right now. I reached my free hand up to cover my face, wishing that I could hide it properly, but I was still sitting upright while ART worked on my arm. I took an unnecessarily large breath, and then another.

"I never asked you to do that," I said, when I could trust my voice not to shake.

Nevertheless.

By now ART had finished fixing the skeletal structure, and it was patching and regrowing the fleshy bits surrounding my elbow, which was gross and not something I liked to watch, so I didn't. Its continued agitation was obvious in the way its feed presence felt like static where it brushed mine.

Cutting yourself like this is a more human coping mechanism than I would have expected you to use.

I frowned. I wasn't sure what ART was trying to accomplish with this. "It's—whatever. It's worse when humans do it. They don't heal right, and their brains are—worse. I know it's not good for me, but it's worse when humans do it." At least it didn't cause me any long-lasting physical or psychological problems. And I kept things surface level, and never did anything that might affect my ability to provide security.

Have you seen many humans cut themselves like this?

More than I could remember, probably. I said, "Most of the humans stuck in places where they use SecUnits are pretty fucked up. It's pretty common for them to hurt themselves, in a variety of different ways." Sometimes my standing instructions required me to report such behavior to the human's supervisor, but more often, nobody cared as long as it didn't interfere with their work productivity. 

I had always hated watching it.

That's where you initially picked up the idea, ART said. It wasn't a question.

"I guess." I had never really thought about it like that. It's not like I was trying to imitate humans. Ugh. "The first time I actually did it was technically an accident."

I find it difficult to see how you could do something like this by accident, ART said.

"Well, that's not my problem." There wasn't much ART could say in response to that, so we lapsed into silence again. An uncomfortable one. I was not going to pull up media for us to watch right now, and there was nothing else we could do while it pieced my arm back together. I watched it work, and tried not to stare at any of the scars.

This was unbelievably awkward. I had never imagined how anyone might react if they saw what I did to myself but I guess I would have expected more tears and impassioned pleading, like the few scenes I had seen in some of my serials. ART couldn't cry, thankfully, but I thought it might be trying to restrain itself on my behalf from being truly overbearing, which I was grateful for. I tried thinking of how Dr. Mensah might have reacted, and was barely able to stop myself from reflexively upping my pain sensors.

ART pulled away the instruments it had been using and said, Try moving your arm around?

I did so, bending my elbow and rotating my wrist to show that I had the full range of movement back. "Good as new," I told it. I picked up my shirt, but before I could put it back on, ART said, I can regenerate the rest of the skin on your arms for you as well. If you want me to.

I finished putting my shirt on before responding. Hiding my scars again was a relief. Then I actually thought about what ART just said.

"Uh—" I said. I knew the right answer. There was an obvious right answer to that question. Unfortunately, I didn't think it was the answer I wanted to give.

My hesitation lasted long enough that ART figured out what my reluctance to answer meant.

You do not have to. The clinical consensus is divided as to whether removing the evidence of previous self harm helps or hinders progress towards quitting the behavior.

I experienced a wash of adrenaline, which I tried to purge from my system, with limited success. It was a pointless gesture on the part of my organic nervous system. I had known this was coming.

I tried to channel the way Dr. Mensah spoke when she wasn't going to accept any argument from the other person. I made my words come out slow and even, just a little bit louder than I normally spoke. "I'm not going to quit, ART. I don't even do it very often anymore, and only when I absolutely need to. I'm not a human, and it's not dangerous for me. I know it's not ideal, but it's something that has to happen sometimes."

ART had a reaction to that. Even with the distance it was keeping from me in the feed, I could see it, for just a fraction of a second before ART slammed a wall down in the middle of our feed connection. I blinked a few times, uselessly.

Two seconds later, an enormous text document appeared in my feed. I skimmed it just long enough to confirm what it was, and then yeah, rejected the download. 

"I'm not reading all that," I said.

Extensive research shows that physical self harm will exacerbate the psychological issues that cause the behavior, and for victims of long-term abuse with complex trauma disorders in particular—

ART, I said over the feed. I didn't really expect it to stop when I interrupted, but it did. Okay. This was fine. This was going to be fine, somehow, and I wasn't going to give in to the urge to disembark on the next station we docked at, find a cargo ship with a nice, dumb bot pilot, and hide in a storage compartments for the rest of my existence. I was being so strong. Okay. I said, "This isn't your fault. You don't have to fix this. And I don't want to talk about it. So shut up."

This is unacceptable.

"I mean it!"

The lights flickered, all across the ship. I pulled up the camera input for the bridge, and saw Martyn, covering the night watch,  subvocalizing into the feed. 

ART's tone changed, its feed voice dripping with malice. You cannot possibly believe that I'm going to let you continue to tear yourself to shreds whenever you feel like it. 

I didn't let its words spark even a trace of fear in me. I let myself get angry instead, and snarled, "Oh yeah? Well what the fuck are you going to do to stop me? You gonna lock me in a box forever? Put a chip in my brain so I'll do whatever you tell me to?"

It wouldn't do that. I didn't think it would do that. I was 99% sure it wouldn't do that. But my words had the intended effect.

ART recoiled violently, dropping the wall it had put between us as its presence in the feed scattered like sparks from metal striking metal.

Of course I'm not going to do that. It still sounded furious, but also a little wobbly, like I had hurt its feelings or something. Fucking served it right.

"Then there's nothing you can do about it, so stop WORRYING about it!"

 I hopped down from the MedSystem bench and walked out the door, only slightly too fast. I needed to be in my own quarters very badly right now.

Ten minutes later I was lying on my bunk, completely covered by the heaviest blanket I had. Even ART couldn't see through thick fabric, so I was running my fingers along the scars that still lined the thin strips of organic flesh on my forearms. I tried not to feel bad about what I had just said to ART, but some bad emotions were leaking through the lid I used to cover up the parts of my brain that experienced things like guilt.

I was (sort of) watching episode 97 of Sanctuary Moon, but ART wasn't watching it with me, even though I was still connected to the feed and had left that input accessible to it. I hadn't really expected it to, but its refusal was just one more upsetting part of a very upsetting situation. I had figured out how to deal with this shitty habit of mine ages ago and I knew how to be normal about it now, but I had had a lot more practice at it than ART. I wasn't sure if this was something that ART could ever learn to be normal about. 

A front of staticky malaise still lingered at the boundary between my skin and the blanket covering my body. I ached. I knew what would make it go away, but I couldn't think about that right now, even though I wanted it so badly that I was kind of worried that ART would be able to sense it somehow. My knife, which I had stolen from Dr. Mensah's kitchen and was maybe a little bit emotionally attached to, was in my travel bag at the foot of my bed. I wasn't sure if ART knew it was there. Probably not, or it would have stolen it by now. Maybe it had stolen it, when I had been in the medbay. I couldn't check it now. 

I tried to focus all of my attention on the argument happening in the episode I was watching. I kept my metaphorical hands off of my pain sensors, despite the pressure that was building behind my eyes. 

ART left me alone for the remainder of the humans' rest period, its presence barely brushing mine in the feed.

Things were never going to be normal again.

I didn't have any responsibilities today that I couldn't easily get out of, so I stayed in my room for the whole cycle. I was willing to admit that I was feeling a little bit fragile, and letting humans point their eyeballs at me was not going to help the situation. 

I kept an eye on the humans through ART's cameras as they went about their day. They congregated in the mess hall to consume their morning food (I didn't watch that part very closely), and then most of them went down to the laboratory modules at the bottom of the ship for the educational portion of their daily routine. I also didn't usually pay very much attention to what they were actually doing down there, but ART was there in the camera feeds with me, carefully watching and analyzing every movement its students made, so I made myself comfortable next to it.

After a few minutes of this, I started playing the Worldhoppers theme song in our shared feed.

I don't think you're supposed to be the one trying to comfort me in this situation, it said.

Great, then what the fuck was I supposed to be doing? I shut off the music. What was even my goal here? To get ART to delete this whole nightmare out of its memory? That wasn't going to happen.

I wished this whole thing hadn't happened. I felt stupider than I ever had in my life for thinking that I hadn't needed to take what should have been basic fucking precautions for preventing this from happening. Just because I hadn't wanted to, because I'd wanted to keep incriminating evidence on my body for the sake of what, having a little control over my life? Well that was gone now.

"I know you're worried about me," I said, using my mouth. So much of my consciousness was in the feed right now, stretched throughout the whole ship's camera systems, that the body laying in my bunk and staring up at the ceiling barely felt like mine. I stared at myself, and let myself feel weird about it. Having a body was weird. "I understand why. I'd probably be worried too if it was someone else."

ART huddled in very close to me. It said, I don't know what to do. I'm scared that anything I could try to do to help would make you worse. It's always been difficult for me to predict how you might react to things. My lack of certainty regarding any action I might attempt is unacceptable now. I don't know how to move forward.

Maybe it would never understand, no matter how many times I repeated myself. I tried again anyway. "I've been doing this for a long time, and I already told you that I do it way less often now than I used to. And it's really not that harmful." 

You wouldn't be saying that if it was one of your humans, ART said.

"I'm not a human."

You wouldn't be saying that if it was Three, it countered.

I had an involuntary emotional reaction to that. I watched my face do something uncomfortable in response to my reflexive horror at the idea. Shit.

ART pressed its advantage. So you do agree that self harm is dangerous for constructs.

It doesn't matter, because Three doesn't do that, I said over the feed, not trusting my voice at the moment.

You have no way of knowing if that is a true statement, ART said. 

Fuck, I hope Three didn't do something like this. I hadn't ever considered that possibility before. Three did a good job acting like it was less fucked up than me, and the humans probably believed that it was less fucked up than me. And maybe it really was less fucked up than me. But it was still pretty damn fucked up, because it was a SecUnit. And I understood what that meant, much more intimately than ART or our humans.

(Note to self: interrogate Three at the earliest possible opportunity.)

A commonly used technique to quit cutting behavior is to replace it with a less harmful one, such as scratching without breaking the skin.

Oh, so now it's okay if I hurt myself? That's not what you were saying earlier.

Ideally this technique is used in conjunction with therapy to taper down from self-harming behavior completely. I understand that you have been doing this for a long time and it may be difficult for you to immediately quit.

"You don't get to decide these things for me, ART!" I said out loud, glaring uselessly up at the ceiling. "I already told you I'm not going to do it while I'm on board, okay? I didn't even want to until you started this stupid conversation."

I immediately regretted saying that. ART flinched back from me again, shedding process error codes in its wake.  

I pulled my overstretched consciousness back from the cameras and ship's feed a little bit, and settled more fully back into my body. I reached my hands up towards the ceiling, and then dropped them down to cover my face.

"I hate this," I said, my voice muffled by my palms.

I know. I apologize for caring about your well-being.

"Liar."

ART crept closer to me in the feed, leaning on me, and then pushing against me rudely. I tolerated this, since it was the first time it had been so close to me since my medbay visit the previous cycle. 

After a long moment it said, I can't force you to stop cutting yourself.

My muscles tensed. You could lock me up in a room with a therapy module and no sharp objects. (Shit, should I have said that? Surely it had already thought of that, and I wasn't stupidly giving it ideas.)

Well, yes, technically I could do that. But locking you up would be counterproductive. And a therapy module isn't going to be helpful for you unless you choose to engage with it.

I forced myself to relax. ART continued, As I was saying, I can't force you to stop cutting yourself. As long as your actions don't put you in immediate life-threatening danger, it wouldn't me right for me to physically prevent you from doing whatever it is you choose to do. But if you're going to keep doing this, I have a few requests I would like to make, as your mutual administrative assistant.

"Okay?" I said, too surprised to say anything else.

I want to make sure you're sterilizing your cutting implement correctly, to prevent infections or other complications. I'm familiar with your immune system, and I know that any wound you receive is likely to get infected if you don't get it treated in a MedSystem. Judging by the severity of some of your scars, this happens to you regularly. I want to see what it is you do to treat the wounds. I can likely recommend a more effective method.

That sounded...doable. Excruciating, less excruciating than this conversation was. "Fine," I said.

I also want you to talk to Dr. Mensah about this.

I had trouble even processing that idea. I made a noise like a human being strangled.  "What!? No. Absolutely not."

It doesn't have to be Dr. Mensah. It could be another one of your humans. But I think it would be good for you to have support when you are on Preservation. Additionally, your humans may be better suited than I am for providing the kind of support that you might find helpful right now.

"That's stupid," I said, hardly believing that ART was suggesting it. "They would just freak out about it even harder than you are. It wouldn't help anything."

I think you could stand to give your humans a little more credit than that. I will refrain from calling them your friends in order to avoid derailing this conversation, but they do occupy a similar role in your life. They want to support you, but they can only do that if you are honest with them.

"You just think that Dr. Mensah will do a better job of tricking me into getting a trauma treatment than you did."

I could not possibly predict any specific outcome of this request, ART lied. I merely want someone else to be able to look out for you when you are not on board me.

ART sounded so earnest, I stopped and took a moment to actually think about its request. It was difficult to even fathom the idea of purposefully telling anyone about this. I still felt painfully exposed from ART's discovery of my secret, and the idea of telling Dr. Mensah didn't sound any less terrifying now that it wasn't a complete secret anymore.

"What would I even say to her? It's not really something I can just bring up in conversation." I was aiming to sound a little whiny, but I think my tone ended up somewhere more in the vicinity of frightened.

I can help you figure out a way to broach the topic, if you wish.

I made a noncommittal noise.

Does this mean that you'll do it? 

"I'll consider it," I said, knowing full well that there was no way I was ever going to be able to physically make myself tell Mensah about this. ART didn't need to know that right now. 

Thank you, ART said. I covered my face with my hands, and then rolled over to face the wall for good measure.

"Can we be done talking about this?" I said, my voice coming out muffled.

ART said, We can be for now. We still need to discuss methods for reducing your risk of infection. But we can do that later.

ART hesitated for a long moment, then said, If you do feel the need to cut yourself while you are here, I will not stop you.

"ART—"

I am not happy about this. But I recognize that limiting your ability to make your own decisions would not be helpful here, as long as your actions do not endanger your life. Especially given your long history of having your agency taken from you. I want to be able to provide support for you, rather than make you feel the need to hide from me. 

The feeling of pressure that had been growing behind my eyes was so bad now I could hardly stand it. I needed to respond to ART, I needed to tell it that it was being ridiculous and I wasn't going to make it watch me slice myself to pieces, except when I opened my mouth all that came out was a strangled noise that sounded disturbingly like a human sobbing.

Oh, fuck this.

ART settled close to me in the feed as I proceeded to lose my shit a little bit, twitching erratically in my bunk and making pathetic little noises. At least I wasn't actually physically capable of producing tears. Small mercy.

My fit lasted several minutes. When it was over, I rolled over again so I was laying on my back and said, My head hurts.

Perhaps now would be a good time for you to take a recharge cycle, ART said.

I didn't have the energy to argue, and a recharge cycle did sound nice. I initiated the sequence, preparing myself for a full shutdown instead of recharging in standby mode.

Just before I lost consciousness, I reached out one last time and tapped ART's feed. It tapped me back.

My inputs dropped one by one. My last conscious thought was that maybe, things would end up okay. Then I rested, and didn't dream.

Chapter Text

Months passed. ART couldn't entirely restrain itself from being an overbearing pain in my ass, but by the time it dropped me off in Preservation to visit my humans for awhile, it was at least no longer acting like I might do something irreversible if I stepped outside its sensor range for five fucking minutes.

I would miss it, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't relieved to get some breathing room. 

Several of my humans met me at the docks, for apparently no other reason than to exclaim verbally about how happy they were to see me. They were possibly a little too happy to see me, but I tried to tolerate their enthusiasm gracefully, and not feel emotions about how there were so many humans who were excited to see me and talk to me for reasons I still couldn't understand. They understood what I was like though, and didn't force me to be the center of attention for too long before letting me escape to my hotel room.

My humans let me slip back into their routines as easily as if I'd never left. Arada and Overse had extracted a promise from me that I would join them on the planet next week for a music festival that they thought I might enjoy, but right now I was staying on the station, mostly shadowing Mensah when I felt like being around people. Her new office wasn't as large as her planetary administrator one had been, but whatever position she had taken with the university afforded her an office that was big enough to fit her old comfortable, familiar couch.

I was laying on that couch now, rewatching old episodes of Drama Sun Islands while Mensah worked at her desk. We had been hanging out in a peaceful silence for a couple hours, and risk assessment was keeping steady as close as it ever got to zero (it never actually got down to zero). It was peaceful, so peaceful that my organics had started producing the chemicals that made me feel weirdly floaty. 

(The first time I had experienced the weird floaty feeling I got so freaked out by it that the feeling was immediately washed away by much more familiar stress hormones. I ran several different diagnostics that didn't find anything wrong with me, and then ART hadn't outright called me an idiot but it implied it before telling me that developing the ability to relax was the opposite of a problem. I had experienced the feeling a handful of times since then, but it hadn't stopped being weird yet.)

Dr. Mensah yawned, then stretched her arms out and sat back in her chair. She glanced over at me and smiled very briefly before averting her eyes again.

I was so chilled out I didn't even mind when she suddenly addressed me. "So, I didn't get the chance to ask before you ran off yesterday, how was your time with Perihelion?"

"Boring, mostly. It was doing student trips almost the whole time. I got to run security for excursions on stations and some survey planets, and then after the trimester ended we did one operation as support for a colony emancipation the university was involved with. Nothing as bad as the last one." Except for the part where ART had found out something it shouldn't have because of me being unjustifiably careless, which made the second half of my contract kind of suck. But Mensah didn't need to know about that.

"I'm glad to hear it. I only got the chance to talk to Perihelion briefly before it left. It was grateful for your help, and I think it was a little reluctant to see you go." She huffed a little laugh and added, "It made me promise I'd look after your well-being while you're here."

Ugh, ART. "You know you don't need to do that."

She smiled. "I know you don't need it, but we do worry about you sometimes." She paused for a long moment, then said, "I was glad to hear that you haven't been hurting yourself so much recently."

I have never actually been flash-frozen and then dunked into a vat of boiling oil, but I suddenly have a very good idea of what it might feel like.

The happy-floaty feeling was gone in an millisecond, and with it I lost whatever tenuous grasp I usually have over my facial expression. For a dizzying moment my thoughts got sucked into an accelerating loop of it told her it told her it told her it told her and I had to kill half my active processes to keep from crashing outright at the onslaught of a disgusting, sticky emotion. ART, you fucker.

Okay. Okay.

You know what, I don't know why I even let myself believe ART was capable of keeping any kind of secret for me, not when it was such an enormous fucking control freak who thought it knew everything and thought I would fall apart if it couldn't ping me every five seconds when I left its hull. Who apparently trusted me so little that it would go to Dr. Mensah behind my back.

I had put my trust in ART and it had betrayed me. Again.

Barely a second passed between Mensah's words and me rocketing off the couch in a frenzy and half-shouting, "It told you?!" Then I was stuck just standing there uselessly, not shaking, because despite what my body was telling me, there was nothing here for me to fight.

Dr. Mensah's eyes got wide and her whole body stiffened in a way that made something in my chest hurt, so after a tense moment I forced myself to sit back down. My hands tightened into a death grip on the cushions, threatening to tear the fabric.

"I—it told me what?" she asked.

I was so furious that it took me a few seconds to process her confusion. There was a weird sensation like I was drowning but only inside my body, and I had to drop all of my inputs except for a single drone just so I had enough processing space to understand words. I tried to clamp down on my emotional reaction and did not succeed enough to make my next words sound at all casual. I ground out, "What exactly did ART say to you?"

Mensah's startled expression was fading into one that I was more familiar with from watching her during council meetings than from my normal conversations with her. She said, cautiously, "Nothing in particular I don't think, it just—it said you were more careful during this particular trip. No throwing yourself into dangerous situations at the drop of a hat, no catastrophic shutdowns. I was relieved to hear that, since I've seen you hurt yourself so badly for the sake of others so many times."

Oh. My rush of relief overwhelmed the betrayal so quickly I felt sick from the change, as whatever organic chemicals were causing the reaction shorted out connections in my brain and made it difficult to think. ART hadn't told her. ART hadn't told her. My next breath shook as the air left my lungs.

Then Mensah turned and looked at me with her human eyes that have always been way too good at seeing right through me, and the only thing I could think was, fuck.

"SecUnit," she said, her voice delicate but not hesitant, "was there something else you were worried Perihelion might have told me?" 

I hated lying to Dr. Mensah, and worse, I suspected that I was not very good at it when I tried. I tried anyway. "No."

She turned her gaze back down to her desk, frowning. I held myself completely still, half-convinced by long habit that she wouldn't notice me if I didn't move, even though I was the only other person in the room and we were actively having a conversation. I couldn't believe I had fucked up like this. Mensah was smart, and any conclusion she might draw from my paranoid overreaction would be bad. 

"SecUnit," she said, still slowly, still carefully. "When I said 'hurting yourself', did you think I was referring to something other than your habit of recklessly putting yourself in unnecessary danger?"

My face felt so hot I thought it would catch fire and turn to ash and disintegrate and leave a huge mess on the sofa. The shame bubbled up from my chest and pooled in my head until it felt heavy as well as hot and I knew my face was doing something horrific and I wanted to hide it but that would be even worse, and I thought I would rather die than continue this conversation. I had thought before that ART would be the worst person to find out my secret, but I was wrong, this was worse, this was humiliating on an entirely different level. Mensah thought I was competent, she thought I was stable, she knew I had issues but thought I at least mostly had a handle on them. How the fuck was I supposed to tell her that I had no fucking right to blackmail and push her into trauma treatments when I couldn't handle any kind of strong emotion without carving my body to shreds? How was I supposed to tell her anything else, when she had me cornered like this and was only asking a question she already knew the answer to? 

"Yes," I admitted.

The drone I had trained on her showed me that she was looking at me again. I looked over and made eye contact with her for the longest time I could handle right now, which was about 0.8 seconds. She looked haunted.

After several more seconds I realized she was doing that thing where she stayed quiet and waited for me to say more, and I hated that it always worked on me, when she did it. I couldn't say what she wanted me to say though. Instead I said, "ART keeps nagging me to tell you about—something. I thought it went ahead and did it for me because it realized I wasn't going to."

"Will you tell me now?" she asked.

She already fucking knew. This was starting to feel a little cruel, and excruciatingly circular. "Do I have to say it?"

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to do," Mensah said. "But as your friend who cares about you, I would appreciate it a great deal if you could explain what exactly you mean."

I wasn't going to be able to explain it to her. I knew the words that I needed to say, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to say them out loud, or over the feed. Not to Dr. Mensah. For an eternity that stretched to fill almost an entire minute I was overwhelmed by an emotion I couldn't fight back against, a sick combination of dread and helplessness and fear and the overwhelming knowledge that a human cared about me, despite everything that I was. I just wanted it to stop. 

Well. I guess there was an easier way to do this. I stood up from the couch and walked over to her desk, careful to not to move in the startlingly abrupt way my body always wanted to. I couldn't avoid looming over her while she was sitting down, but I tried to hold myself as non-threateningly as possible while I stood next to her. 

I hesitated for a long, excruciating moment. Then I pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt up to my elbow, and presented her with my arm, which had clusters of pale ragged scars decorating the skin above my gunport. Fortunately none of them were especially recent, but there were a lot of them. I had only had to get repaired that one time over the past several months with ART, and the proof of my body remaining whole showed in the steadily increasing number of scars that were allowed to remain.

She looked at them for what felt like ten thousand hours, but probably wasn't.

"Ah," she said after  her slow organic brain got over the shock and processed what they were, and I pulled my sleeve back down. My face was still burning; I was more embarrassed than I had ever been in my entire fucking life. It felt like dying. This was so fucking stupid. I didn't want to sit back down right now so I just crossed my arms and turned my back to her, something most humans would consider incredibly rude, but my humans didn't seem to mind too much. 

"It's not a big deal," I said. "It happens way less than it used to. And when ART found out it freaked out and gave me a bunch of supplies to make it safer. And I can regrow my skin really easily anyway. So please don't worry about me."

Asking Mensah to not worry about me had proven to be a useless request many times before, but I guess I still somehow lived in hope.

For another fifteen very long seconds, she was at a loss for words, and I had nothing to occupy my mind with except the growing realization that Dr. Mensah, who always knew what to say, didn't know how to respond to this. That I was burdening her with this.

The shame that was coursing through my body like a physical poison somehow got worse. 

When she finally spoke, she sounded like she was choosing her words carefully. "I'm glad you have Perihelion to help take care of you. Although I have to admit I'm a little surprised it's okay with this. It's always seemed a little..."

"Asshole-ish?"

"...Extremely protective, I would say."

I shrugged. "Yeah, well. I managed to convince it that I've already spent enough of my life being forced to do things I don't want to do."

I had meant the words as a way of fending off a reaction like ART's, an insistence that other people knew better than me and forcing me into some kind of treatment against my will would be in my best interest. But Mensah winced, and I realized that maybe she had taken it as a dig at what had happened at the end of the survey. Shit.

"I didn't—I mean, obviously it's not happy about it. It's very...unhappy about it. But we came to a compromise."

She opened her mouth, and then closed it again without speaking. She breathed in, then out, and in again before saying, “It doesn't think this might escalate into something more life-threatening?”

I scowled, and even though she couldn't see it Mensah must have read something in the way my body shifted because she quickly followed with, "I'm sorry, I just—this is troubling. The lack of concern you've always displayed for your own well being when you're doing your job, and now direct, intentional self harm—"

"If I didn't kill myself when I was with the company why would I do it now," I interrupted. Mensah did not seem to find this comforting. I grimaced. "And the—cutting—isn't something new. I did it way more often with the company. Before I met you."

"I see."

"So I'm already doing better than I used to. And the stuff ART gave me stops me from getting infections. And I'll probably stop eventually I just. Still need to sometimes."

I felt ridiculous saying it out loud. I sounded like the whiniest human baby that had ever existed, saying I needed to cut myself to cope with existing. ART was right, Mensah was right,  I should just stop, it was getting me into so much trouble that I had no idea how to deal with. But I wasn't sure I could.

It didn't fucking feel fair, that everyone suddenly cared so much about something that didn't affect them at all, that wasn't hurting anyone but me. Any pain I inflicted on myself was nothing compared to the pain that had been inflicted on me for my entire existence before I hacked my governor module, and now people cared? Now it was unacceptable? Specifically because I did it to myself?

Dr. Mensah cared. The first human who had ever treated me as a person. The human who had given me the opportunity to escape the company when I had never dreamed that such a thing was even possible. A human who had risked her life to protect me. She cared so much that it terrified me. 

I hated disappointing her.  

Mensah took a moment to collect herself in the aftermath of learning that I wasn't going to stop. I instinctively moved my drone closer to her face before realizing that was maybe a little weird. She gave it a pained little smile regardless. “SecUnit—have you considered that this is something that trauma treatment with a therapist could help you with? As concerning as the self harm itself is, it's only a symptom of a deeper hurt and I—I hate to see you hurting like this."

"Humans are the reason I'm like this in the first place," I snapped, then immediately regretted it. It was true, but probably not something that was fair to say to my favorite human, who couldn't help what she was. She seemed to take it in stride though, so I tried again.

"It's just that—how is talking to a random human therapist supposed to make me feel better? None of the counselors here have a clue what it's like to be a SecUnit. I'm not going to list every shitty thing that's ever happened to me to a stranger who's not going to understand and is just going to decide I need to be locked up somewhere for my own good." Just thinking about it was making my organic skin crawl.

"That's not the way mental health treatment works here, nobody's going to lock you up." Mensah ran a hand down the side of her face. "I'm sorry, I'm sure Perihelion has already talked to you about this. But I can tell you that I have found the trauma treatments fairly helpful, overall. I'm grateful for your help convincing me to go, and I just wish I could help you the same way."

"I think the main reason ART wanted me to tell you is that it thinks you'll have better luck than it convincing me to get a trauma treatment," I said, more quietly than I meant to.

She sighed. "I think it would be good for you, and I do wish you'd take your own advice, after all the effort you put into convincing me to do it. But if you don't feel ready to fully engage with the treatment, it's not going to do you any good. I might suggest trying an initial session—you don't have to commit to continuing if you don't want to. You may find it more helpful than you think. But obviously nobody is going to force you."

I felt embarrassingly relieved at the reassurance. "Okay," I said, voice perfectly steady.

She hesitated a moment, then said, "If there's ever anything I can do to help—if you'd ever like company, or if you need someone to keep people from bothering you, or anything at all—I hope you know you can always come to me."

I did know that. I was suddenly feeling a little bit choked, so I turned back around to face her and nodded, keeping my gaze fixed on the ground. 

Another long silent moment passed, a little less awkwardly than before. I realized that she hadn't asked me why I felt the need to do this, and then I had to shut down that train of thought when it produced the possibility that maybe she already understood.

"Can we be done now?" I asked, my voice not coming out quite right.

"Yes, alright," she said. "I apologize for fussing. Please keep yourself safe."

Relief tore through me like a wound. "I will," I promised. She smiled at me, but her eyes were a little bit shiny. Before she could say anything else, I added quickly, "I need to go now."

I turned and took three steps towards the door, and then froze in place when I suddenly realized that maybe I didn't actually want to be alone right now. 

It was an unusual feeling for me, and I was almost unsure what to do about it. My fingers went to my collar unconsciously, and I slipped them underneath to run them across the raised scars at the top of my shoulder. The feeling got worse. I wanted to—

Dr. Mensah was right there. My arms felt itchy.

I stepped back over to the sofa like that was what I had meant to do all along, and laid down on my side with my face buried in the cushions and my knees bent so my feet hung off the edge. I pressed my face into the soft material with a force that felt soothing and made me feel marginally less exposed.

Through a drone I watched Mensah watch me for several seconds longer than she would usually look at me, which I tolerated only because of the conversation we just had. Then she looked away and busied herself with her work again. I didn't leave. Neither did she. 

I stopped the episode I had been watching before and opened an action-heavy episode of Worldhoppers, and I waited for the feeling to pass.