Work Text:
Perihelion, is SecUnit back online? Is it functional?
I was, in fact, back online, enough that I could easily pick up the distress in Mensah’s “I’m trying to outwardly keep my shit together” feed voice. Whether I was functional was a whole other question and yeah, there was no way I was going to touch that one right now.
In response, ART said, Yes, SecUnit’s essential functions have been restored, which I thought was being kind of generous, but whatever. I laid back on the MedSystem platform and closed my eyes because I knew what was coming next, and “humans getting SecUnit to talk about its feelings” was way down at the bottom of the list of things I wanted to do, just above “interacting with anyone who watched me knock myself offline for no fucking reason.”
SecUnit? May I come in?
There was a pretty big part of me that wanted to say no. I knew Mensah wouldn’t argue if I did. There was another really big part of me that wanted to go to my cabin, lie down on the bunk, put on Sanctuary Moon, and never talk to anyone ever again rather than have to face any of the humans who’d been there to experience my whole stupid thing. (Let’s be real, that’s what most of me wanted. Actually, that sounded pretty good to me almost all the time, but you and I both know the stats on me ever getting what I want.) (Yes, I’ve run the numbers before, and yes, they’re about as depressing as you’d expect.) But this was going to happen eventually; for one, there was no way ART was going to let this go. Plus, I’d feel sort of bad sending Mensah away to worry about me on her own.
Also, I wasn’t going to tell anyone this, but it’s not like I was having a great time, either, and talking to Mensah maybe wouldn’t be so awful right now. So, you know, there’s that. All right, fine. I’m doing it, okay.
I reached out and tapped her feed. Sure, I sent her.
I didn’t bother opening my eyes as ART let her into the medical bay. My drones were around somewhere in standby—someone had been nice enough to bring them in here for me—but honestly, I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself with them. Besides, I had enough access to ART’s cameras here that I didn’t really need them. I watched Mensah walk in and glance at me. She was obviously trying really hard to act like this was not a huge deal, she was totally calm and holding it together, why do you ask, of course it’s perfectly normal for SecUnit to collapse in an unresponsive heap in the middle of a strategic planning session. (To be fair, there’s always a non-zero possibility of that happening, maybe more like 15 to 20 percent probability with my track record. That kind of thing freaks humans out at the best of times, though, even the ones who think of you as a glorified appliance. And considering the whole alien contamination thing we’d all just been through, yeah, valid, I wasn’t going to argue with some level of freaking out about it.)
She sat on a bench near the platform I was on and, for thirty-four seconds, didn’t say anything. I didn’t know if she was waiting for me to talk or something, but I was feeling awkward enough that I had to break the silence. (Ugh, yes, that’s what I do with humans all the time, and yes, I see the irony. No, I don’t want to talk about it.) “I’m sorry, Dr. Mensah.”
She blinked like she was surprised and let out a breath that I thought seemed a little shaky. Yeah, no kidding, me too. “For what? There’s nothing you need to apologize for.”
I don’t know if I’d go that far, ART commented, because it’s an asshole that thinks it’s invited to participate in every conversation.
“Fuck you,” I said, but my heart wasn’t really in it, and I knew ART could tell. Ugh, if it started being nice to me, I was just not going to be able to handle that right now, absolutely fucking not. I told Mensah, “I messed up the planning session. I had a false memory, ART checked my activity logs. Some of it really happened, but not like that, not with those specific details.”
“Yes,” Mensah said, “Perihelion let us know what you discovered once it was able to access your archive.” Great, thanks a lot, ART. Like it wasn’t bad enough that I’d borked myself in front of everyone, now they would all know I’d done it over something fake I apparently made up in my own head. ART’s crew was for sure going to love that. Mensah was still talking, so I ran back the video a couple seconds to see what I’d missed. “We have a theory about what may have happened, if you’d like to hear it.”
I already had a feeling I wasn’t going to like it, but sure, why not. “Okay,” I said. I didn’t bother asking who “we” was because, let’s be honest, I was not going to be happy with any answer to that question. I was also pointedly not checking ART’s other cameras I could access because I really didn’t need to know if anyone else was talking about this whole whatever it was and what they were saying about it.
(It’s not as bad as it sounds; obviously I’d run a query of everyone’s position and status as soon as I came back online. The inputs were just backburnered and I had a keyword search going in the background just in case. Threat assessment was holding pretty low. Plus ART would alert me if something was up, and Three—well, Three was around, anyway. I don’t know, it’s complicated, forget it. The point is even if something was badly fucked with me, it’s not like I totally forgot how to do my entire job.)
Mensah shifted a little on the bench, the swishy fabric of her pants rustling. I could feel ART’s attention sharpen as it focused on her explanation.
“There are certain common symptoms that can manifest in response to trauma.” I could tell she was picking her words carefully. She looked down at the shiny, spotless floor of the medical bay as she spoke. (When I say spotless, I mean really, ART’s floors are like “even the vague suggestion of dirt has been obliterated” level of clean. ART can detect dust and specks I can’t even pick up with my enhanced vision filters, not to mention how many drones it has dedicated just to cleaning. (I tried not to be too jealous about that. I really, really miss having more drones.)) “Sometimes, people have vivid flashbacks paired with intense emotional reactions, to the point where it feels like they’re re-experiencing the traumatic event. These kind of flashbacks can be very frightening and stressful.”
“It wasn’t a flashback,” I said. Talking about this, even with Mensah, was giving me a weird, restless feeling. I kind of wished Dr. Bharadwaj was here, not that I knew what I’d say to her, either. “The memory was inaccurate. I remembered things that didn’t happen.”
Human memory storage and retrieval is extremely imprecise, ART said. There is extensive research indicating that trauma further disrupts the process.
It was at this point I finally opened my eyes and glared at the ceiling. (Yeah, of course I know ART isn’t in the ceiling, but the humans insisted on acting like it was, and, ugh, I was starting to pick up that habit from them, wasn’t I.) “I’m not human.”
You have human neural tissue, idiot.
Like ART was some kind of expert on how any of this works, anyway. Okay, sure, its MedSystem is certified for trauma recovery, so what, that doesn’t make it not a huge asshole. No, I wasn’t just finding other stuff to focus on so I didn’t have to deal with what they were saying, shut up, nobody asked.
Mensah said, “There’s very limited research on the way machine intelligence interacts with organic-based cognition in constructs, and what does exist is concentrated in just a few areas.” I knew what she meant without asking; mostly, they wanted to know how to make us follow orders, how to design our governor modules to be the most effective, whether we were going to snap and kill all the humans, you know, important stuff like that. “We can’t confirm if what SecUnit experienced is similar to trauma response in humans. But Perihelion is right that the memories associated with these types of flashbacks can be exaggerated or inaccurate.”
Something in the way she said the last part hit me, and I realized she was talking about herself and her own experience. Well, fuck. I’d been so caught up in worrying about my stupid shit that I forgot she’d interrupted her trauma treatment to chase us down after ART’s whole “send the Targets after SecUnit by making them think it’s a super-weapon” plan. (Yeah, I know, it was a kidnapping. We all know ART kidnapped me. But it kept acting all annoyed and offended when I used that word and complaining about how it had already apologized, its crew had been in danger and did I want them to get killed, and everything had ultimately worked out so what more did I want from it, and it was just a whole thing, so whatever.)
I sat up and swung my legs around to hang off the edge of the platform. All right, Murderbot, let’s do this. I needed to get it the fuck together. We didn’t have time for me to sit around being freaked out and traumatized and feeling sorry for myself. There was still a whole colony of humans we had to figure out how to save, or at least convince not to sign themselves up for corporate slave labor for the rest of their lives, which was surprisingly a lot harder than you would think. Though, I don’t know, with all the experience I had with humans and their relentless determination to always do the absolute worst thing possible, maybe I shouldn’t have been that surprised, I guess. Not to mention we were going to have to deal with whatever bullshit Barish-Estranza was undoubtedly cooking up now that they had reinforcements. Yeah, so, things weren’t looking super great for us right now.
I looked over at Mensah where she sat, or really more like looked into the distance a bit over her right shoulder. “How do I stop it?” I asked. “I need to prevent myself from going into an involuntary shutdown again.”
She smiled a little with just the corner of her mouth, a wry expression that seemed a little sad. “If only it were that easy.”
ART was digging around in its trauma treatment module. We need to identify the trigger for the memory incident and determine whether there are any other potential triggers. Then we can formulate a plan for how SecUnit can temporarily avoid those triggers while it undergoes trauma recovery.
Mensah was nodding. I didn’t have a great feeling about where this was going. “Maybe it would be safest for the time being if you stayed on Perihelion. It might be better for you than heading to the planet again.”
And there it was, I was being taken out of play, relegated to sitting around uselessly on ART while everything was going down. I wanted to argue, but what would I even say? It’s not like I knew what had set off this whole incident, and there was no way I could guarantee it wouldn’t happen again, that I would be functional and able to do my job. I couldn’t help running through scenarios in my head where I knocked myself offline while facing a bunch of hostiles and all the humans wound up dead. Yeah, there was no way I was letting that happen. Which meant Mensah was probably right; in my current state I was a danger to everyone, just as likely to get them all killed as to protect them. Wow, okay, this really fucking sucked.
ART poked me on our private channel. Your performance reliability is dropping.
I’m fine, I said. I was lying and ART knew I was lying, but this wasn’t the moment to get into it all, and for once we actually seemed to be on the same page about that. (I know, right?) My organic parts were starting to feel gross and clammy, and my anxiety levels were steadily climbing.
Mensah could tell, because of course she could. “We don’t have to decide anything right this minute,” she told me in her best “don’t worry, everything is going to turn out all right” voice. “Why don’t we give Amena a call? She’s been very concerned about you.”
Okay, that was something I could do, something I focus on. Something I could try to un-fuck. And as much as I really didn’t want to talk to anyone right now (like even more than usual, if you can believe that), I knew it would be a lot worse to let Amena sit around spiraling on the Preservation responder. “Sure,” I said.
Mensah exhaled, releasing some tension, and got to her feet. I caught her sideways glance as she subtly examined me, then pretended I hadn’t. There was so much I wanted to say, but I didn’t know how to make sense of or talk about any of it. Mensah was pretty good at this kind of thing but she was obviously upset right now and distracted by everything else going on, which, yeah, me too. It’s not like we could just ask Barish-Estranza to please cool it for a while, our SecUnit broke itself over a stupid fake memory and we need some time to figure that one out, thanks. Plus, Mensah was still working through her own complicated emotional stuff; she didn’t need to deal with me falling apart on top of all that.
Stop ruminating, ART said. I was trying to keep my expression neutral but it knew me too well. You’re going to make it worse.
I wasn’t going to respond to that. I stood from the MedSystem platform as Mensah tapped the comm connection to the Preservation responder. It’s fine, I was totally fine and normal, we were going to talk to Amena and she was going to see how everything was great and how completely fine and normal I was. Yeah, I don’t even know if I’m convincing myself.
The thing I haven’t told you and was absolutely not planning to tell anybody is that Mensah’s suggestion was like a punch of relief to the chest. (Look, I never said I was any good at metaphors, or maybe that’s a simile, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. They don’t give SecUnits modules for this. Don’t worry about it.) The thought of not having to go back to the planet felt safe and incredibly appealing, like queuing up one of my favorite episodes of Sanctuary Moon. That was really, really not good.
I was here to do my job, to do security. To get ART’s crew to think it might be worth taking me along and letting me stay with them. How was I supposed to do that if I lost my edge, if I wasn’t able to do the thing that was my whole reason for existing? I mean, look at me, I wouldn’t have let me join a crew like this.
What did I just fucking tell you?
Not now, ART. Mensah was greeting Amena on the comm. Pushing everything down, I ran back the conversation to catch myself up.
Okay, I couldn’t do this right now. I had to reassure Amena about how alive I was. I had to stop stressing out Mensah. Somehow I had to not crash myself with any more false memories.
I was pretty sure I would have plenty of time later to think about just how badly I’d fucked everything up.