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I was an oddity. I had 2 marital partners and a couple kids waiting for me at home when most of my handler peers were lucky to have parents. That was by design. Handlers die a lot, it was a hazard of the job, so Barish-Estranza recruited loners and orphans usually from the failed colonies they pillage. They didn’t have to pay reparations if there was no one left to receive them and they got to absorb the poor handler’s meager estate. Most handlers with families got pushed into retirement or shoved into the training center to rot as a result.
Corporate had been trying to get me to retire or transfer since the ink dried on my first marriage request. I had resisted until now. I figured I’d have one last placement to get the wander lust out of my blood before I settled in with my marital partners and celebrated my youngest’s graduation from the Engineering Training Center.
Then I met the SecUnits, all fresh with no field experience, which was highly irregular in itself. The class 1 was trying its best, but it had reached all of its promotion requirements in the Training Center. It had no real world experience and couldn’t teach it’s 02 or 03.
Beyond that, it was a wiped SecUnit. I had too many years telling me that a memory wipe wouldn’t erase whatever trauma it went through before I got it.
Regardless, they were naïve and so, so eager to please.
Truthfully, they reminded me of my kids.
They were clueless and stumbling and punished for every tiny infraction. My heart hurt for them the same it hurt for my children when they learned how to walk or talk or read.
The beginning of the end was when they began asking me for definitions. No SecUnit who had ever worked under me had done that before. Usually, the ship database had everything they needed. All technical definitions, organization explanations, and personnel profiles were accounted for.
Definitions for “family”, “home”, “friends”, and “love” weren’t in the database and I had no idea how to define them. I didn’t know if the SecUnits could even understand those. They had human faces, sure, but I had no idea if they could feel. Most of my training material said no, but a few decades of watching and talking to SecUnits had me unsteady in that belief.
In the end, I decided to relax their governor modules and allow them to watch media from the ship’s archive for context. I even gave them a feed channel to safely voice their questions and comments about what they watched.
01 leaned towards dramas. It disliked action and got way too into romance plots. 02 liked comedy. It found the amusement sigils 3 cycles into the channel and somehow managed to litter its operational reports with them. 03 enjoyed typical space operas. It argued with 01 about the necessity of romance subplots in its space exploration shows and with 02 about bad space puns.
Watching those conversations happen faster than I could fully comprehend them reminded me so viscerally of my children. A few times, I caught myself calling them by my children’s names. They were confused, but their governor modules wouldn’t let them ask questions. I wouldn’t know how to answer anyway.
I started to see their personalities. That was more dangerous than anything a handler would ever encounter.
I gave them more freedom, slowly. I let them sit and lie down and hug each other. I brought them blankets and stuffed animals and on one occasion, I brought them a stack of coloring books and sticks of colored wax.
02 and 03 especially loved the books. It wasn’t uncommon to find them sprawled out on the ready room floor between patrols and recharge cycles coloring. I had more of their pictures in my quarters than I did from my own children.
01 kept its coloring book tucked under its cubicle bunk. I had only ever caught it tucked under the ready room table with its too tall frame and too long legs holding a fragile stick of wax in its too strong hands once. It had jumped to its feet and tossed the book as if I had caught it doing something egregious.
Those crayons survived the voyage better than I did.
We lost 02 3 cycles after we sent the first contact party for something so, so stupid.
All 6 human crew members were killed in a freak weather event. 02 survived the event. It did not survive the distance limitation.
I had been toying with the idea of breaking the governor module entirely. I could do it, I knew the governor module code by heart and reversing it was easy. I did it the night we recovered 02.
01 and 03 went silent then. The media channel froze on 02’s final, amusement sigil ridden message about its most recent comedy special. The coloring books and wax sticks gathered dust beside the projectile weapon rack.
I had lost a lot of SecUnits in my time. Many of them had been lost to the distance limitation.
And yet I had never experienced this horrible grief over them. I guess I had never known any of my other SecUnits.
This was a feeling that I only worried about. I worried when my daughter graduated from the Training Center. I worried when she was deployed for the first time. I worried when my child became a ship supervisor. I would worry when my son joined a crew as an engineer. I would worry when they all came home safe.
I wouldn’t come home safe.
I decided that when I walked into the ready room and found 01 and 03 shoulder to shoulder on the floor leaning against the closed door of 02’s cubicle. Its body was inside, but there wasn’t anything the cubicle could do. The distance limitation was designed to erase all data on a SecUnit. Its programming, its learning modules, its memory, everything. It was one of the few things the SecUnit manufacturer did right.
I couldn’t bring them home like that. They deserved better. They deserved media and blankets and coloring books and safety and they couldn’t get there without me. 01 couldn’t pull an escape off without getting caught and killed. If they were going to leave, I would too.
There was a rumor among handlers about the university. Apparently, they would help handlers and their SecUnits escape to somewhere better, somewhere safe. All I had to do was get to their ship.
Of course, a different rumor called the university a terrorist organization that bombed infrastructure, executed handlers, and dismantled SecUnits for their raw parts, but Barish-Estranza wasn’t really any different. They were worse, actually. At least there was a chance to survive the university.
So, I found myself begging on my knees in front of a university shuttle and its crew with no augments, no feed access, no way to know if Barish-Estranza would come after us.
01 and 03 were all I had and they begged alongside me.
Maybe I’d see my family again one day. Maybe my daughter would make the same choice I did.
At least they’d receive my reparations.