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Come down here and get your SecUnit. It was Senior Officer Indah according to the message. She was in charge of station security.
My SecUnit? Gurathin set aside the journal he'd been reading about the competing needs of circuit miniaturization and robustness.
Mensah's on-planet. Ratthi's unconscious. Pin-Lee doesn't have her interface in. You're next. Also, it's asking for you.
He stood abruptly, looking around and trying to think if there was anything he should bring. Ratthi's unconscious? Why is Ratthi unconscious?
He over-indulged. So did SecUnit but it's up and walking around. It's acting strange. It said to call you.
He didn't wait another second. I'll be right there.
A quick jaunt across the station later, he had to deal with, Hey. Hey. You're here! I hate you. That's why I called you. Had them call you. I heard them call you. Hey. Hey. You're not answering me. Hey.
Gurathin had enough augmentation to pick up the pings it was sending, too, but his only means of response was in the feed. He gave SecUnit a brief, level look. It was standing stiffly, staring at him, and its feed voice sounding odd. It also was not stopping as he talked to the nervous security person who had been assigned to watch SecUnit until Gurathin took custody of it, or whatever it was he was doing.
Are you paying attention to me? I'm looking at you. I'm always looking at you. I'm always looking at everyone. Or a lot of people. All over the place. They don't want me looking at them. I don't want to look at them. But I do. Want to. I think I'm confused. Thank you for being here. Why am I wrong?
"Yes, thank you." Gurathin waved off Officer Tifany and turned to face SecUnit, who was still staring at him. In the feed, he sent, What happened?
Don't look at me!
Gurathin pointedly directed his eyes elsewhere. Are you going to answer the question?
I didn't know I could get drunk by inhalants. There was a thing and I breathed it and it's in my face and my brain and I don't know how to get rid of it. It's like malware. I feel weird. I feel wrong. I don't think I'm going to die but this is weird and help me.
Was it alcohol?
I don't know. I don't know what it was. I didn't ask. I didn't talk. Indah and questions and I told her to call you. Never trust security. They're working for SecSystem. After a pause, it added, I think Pin-Lee's getting laid.
Gurathin rubbed his face in exasperation. The best person to ask was Ratthi and he was no more in a fit state to answer than SecUnit was. For confidentiality reasons, the medical staff likely wouldn't tell him what he was high on unless he had a consent form from whoever Ratthi's designated proxy was. Gurathin's luck – that person had been at the same party and was also wasted. He sighed. Has this ever happened to you before?
I didn't know it could happen? What's wrong with me? Is this permanent? I'm not drunk. I am drunk. I didn't drink anything how can I be drunk? My processes are falling all over themselves. I can't function like this! I'm going to be shut down! Why haven't I already shut down? What if I hurt someone? I'm dangerous, Gurathin! Its gunports engaged then disengaged but its arms stayed locked at its sides.
Can you calm down? They were still in the foyer of station security, right in front of the reception officer, who had no doubt seen the weapon deployment.
What the fuck sort of question is that?
It's a serious question. I'm not joking, but I am asking. Is that within your ability right now? How alarmed do I need to be here?
A shudder passed through SecUnit. Then, Yes. I can calm down. After a pause, it said in an entirely different tone of feed voice, I don't really hate you. You're a client. I don't hate clients. No, wait, I've hated a lot of clients it just didn't matter. I still tried to keep them safe. So I guess I could hate you, too.
Gurathin sighed again. Let's get you out of station security and … to my quarters. Then I'll do some research on your condition.
It went back to the excitable, jittery voice from before. Your quarters? I'm not a sexbot. I don't want to be in your bed while you're doing gross things to me. That's disgusting. Why did you even suggest that?
I literally didn't.
Oh. It looked confused.
Will you come with me?
Yes.
Gurathin walked away a few steps. It didn't move. He sent, SecUnit, please follow me. This was going to be very complicated if it was too far gone to follow directions. Then it started after him, its gait jerky but effective. He foresaw a very long night.
I was a hybridized set of organic and inorganic mental processes piloting an ambulatory weapons platform. When you came down to it, the 'me' were those processes. Anything that messed them up, messed me up. And if I were messed up, then a messed up me was still piloting a fully armed machine capable of a lot of …
Yeah.
Ratthi. My priority was Ratthi. I looked at him. He was intoxicated. He was … making a bad decision. He was … over there. Dancing. Badly. No. I had done something wrong. That wrong thing was to come here, having offered to be his designated sober companion and then somehow become not sober. I had … I was confused. This was dangerous. I couldn't allow this to happen.
I walked over, picked him up, and left.
"Don't. Stop. Me. Now!" Ratthi sang quietly as I carried him out of the party and into the corridor, ignoring a handful of calls and jeers behind me. "Because I'm having a good time," he crooned, waving his one unencumbered hand along with the tune he was badly rendering. I recognized the song. It was tempting to sing along with him.
"I'm having a good time, having a good time! Yeah, I'm … having a good time now!" He hummed the rest.
It was also tempting to think at least part of me was performing adequately, but I didn't think that was correct. I was a rogue murderbot not even reliably under my own control. Or, no, I was entirely under my own control, but there was something wrong with the me that was me. I couldn't parse it. My systems weren't functioning correctly.
I walked, my internal feed a mess, unable to do anything coherent. Then I stopped. I had reached a place. It was station security. There were people hurrying to me. Then they moved slower as Ratthi greeted them cheerily. They pried him out of my arms.
I needed to tell them he was unharmed, but was he? And why was I here? I was security and this was station security, so … yeah? But I should have taken him to Medical. So he could be detoxed or whatever. Station security was leading him away. I think I was swaying. Either that, or Indah was swaying. She was talking to me. I was ignoring her but I think my mouth was moving without me knowing about it. Wouldn't be the first time.
I had made such a bad judgment in coming here. Now he was going to be locked up. Or would he? Had he committed a crime? I tried to remember. I didn't think he had. (Aside from dancing badly. And the singing.) I was the one who had made the mistake, or the crime, or was a crime. I should be locked up. I didn't want to be locked up. But maybe I needed to be?
Indah gave up on talking to me (or finished, I don't know; I don't think I was party to that conversation) and ushered people away from me. That was for the best. I didn't want to be locked up.
7.32 minutes passed. For 7.31 of those minutes, I was perusing the attached file information that came with the first episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I'd never paid much attention to that before since I didn't care where the show was made, or how, or what corporation claimed what rights over it. I wasn't sure why I was looking at it now. But suddenly there was Gurathin in front of me.
"SecUnit?"
"Why are you here?"
"Mensah is on-planet, Ratthi is indisposed, and Pin-Lee didn't answer her comm. I was next on the list."
"Pin-Lee is fucking that corporate who came on-station today." I didn't even know how I knew that.
Gurathin pursed his lips and looked down with a wince. Maybe I shouldn't have blurted that out. Was I talking to him on the feed? Was I recording this conversation correctly? If I was, did that constitute data mining that I didn't want to be doing? Fuck the company! I deleted all records from the previous hour. Gurathin asked, "Are you okay?"
"No."
"Can you give me a diagnostic?"
"No."
"Are you under the effect of malware?"
"No. I inhaled. Breathing stuff. Ratthi knows. He was there. I was supposed to keep him safety for him. He's alive?" Then because I had no filter at all, I added, "Wait, that sentence didn't make sentence. Sensee. Sense. Shit." I poked my language module but I didn't think that was the source of the problem.
"Yes, Ratthi is okay. It sounds like you have been compromised by an inhaled intoxicant. Does that sound accurate?"
"Yes." Why was he having to say this? Couldn't he just tell? I was barely coherent. There was definitely a feed conversation going on. I found the screen. It included words I didn't remember saying. Was that actually me? Multi-track processing apparently has a drawback. Fuck that other me. I deleted the newly accumulated log entries. "I have you. Hate you. No, I don't. But I should. Used to. My filter is bad."
"I can tell." So, yeah, now he could tell. He looked grim. But he looked grim a lot of the time. "Can you come with me? Senior Indah has asked me to clear you from her lobby."
Oh. Yeah. They probably didn't want a dangerous rogue murderbot hanging around, shooting people. Not that I'd shot anyone here yet. Had I? I was pretty sure I hadn't. I engaged my gunports just to be sure. Yes, they worked. No, the feeling didn't feel familiar, like it was something I'd done recently. So maybe … yeah, maybe I hadn't shot anyone tonight.
"Will you come with me?" Gurathin asked in a leading tone of voice, like I'd missed something important. Asshole.
"You're here." There was nowhere to go. He was right there.
He nodded and walked away. I stared forward, mind wandering. I was suspiciously monitoring that feed channel I'd found in case I was still talking to him on it. All it had said recently was 'Yes' in response to his last question. Then a new line appeared in the log, this time from Gurathin. SecUnit, please follow me.
Right. I was, after all, an ambulatory weapons platform. I might not be safe to be moved around the station. But I followed him anyway.
You're moving yourself.
He had me there. I spent the whole walk to wherever we were going trying to come up with a good comeback and just utterly failing. It was so important. I needed to say something snappy, witty, insulting even. I knew the exact parameters of the emotional impact I wanted to achieve, but words were hard. There were too many of them.
We stopped outside a door he opened with an archaic metal key. I finally resorted to telling him, "You're bad."
"Am I?" Fucker had better not think that was funny. He had his back to me so I couldn't see his face.
"Yes. You're the worst." He wasn't, but I couldn't figure out what else to say. The feed channel had been blank since we left station security. I wish I'd kept talking to him on it, because I might have given me some tips on what to say.
He walked inside. I followed him. He circled to shut the door behind me because I hadn't. I was too shocked by the realization these were his quarters. Or his quarter. Why was it plural? "I'm not a sexbot. I don't want to be in your bed while you're doing gross things to me. That's disgusting. Why would you even suggest that?"
His eyes widened at me briefly as he came back in front of me. "I didn't."
"Then who did?"
"You're the one who brought it up. Again." He shut his eyes and shook his head dismissively. "Never mind. Please, sit down. I'm going to do some research to see what we can do to fix this."
"I'm a danger to everyone." And what did he mean by 'Again'?
"No, I think you're fine."
"I have weapons in my arms. That's the point of me. That's why I exist. To shoot people." I thought about deploying them again but no, he already knew they were there.
"That's not- You might have been made- It- SecUnit, you're fine. Just relax."
"I can't relax," I said anxiously. "I literally can't." 'Literally' – hadn't he said 'I literally didn't' instead of 'I didn't'? How many times had we had that exchange?
"Right now, or ever?" That distracted me. I stared at the wall, trying to think of the last time I'd 'relaxed'. "Sit down."
I didn't have to do what he said. "No." Gurathin looked at me with an unimpressed expression. "Stop looking at me!"
Gurathin pointedly directed his eyes elsewhere. Ha, he had to do what I said! He took a seat. Then I did too, just to prove I could.
I told him, "I'm dangerously impaired."
"Okay."
"You're just agreeing?"
"Yes, I am. I rely on your judgment of yourself."
"That's a mistake. My judgment right now is shit."
"Maybe so. If you'll be quiet for a moment, I need to look some things up."
I was quiet for 1.2 seconds. "The reason you were on the list is because you wouldn't be caught dead fucking some corporate product."
"I don't want to discuss Pin-Lee's choice of partners."
What? "I was talking about yours."
"I don't have any."
"Exactly."
Ratthi demonstrated. He put the mouthpiece to his lips and sucked, drawing in smoke from the smoldering pellet he'd put in the pipe's bowl. It flared red in the process. He moved the mouthpiece away from his lips, waited several seconds, and then exhaled the smoke slowly. He made a relaxed, satisfied sound.
"Now you." He handed the pipe to Gurathin.
All this was new to me. The mining installations, space stations, and sealed habitats I'd spent my known life in had controlled atmospheres and no inhaled intoxicants. The concept was in my lexicon and contraband lists, but I'd never seen it used. This Preservation variant might have no Corporation Rim parallel.
Gurathin went through the same steps. The stem of the pipe contained an elaborate filtration process that removed harmful impurities but not the active ingredient, or so Ratthi had tried to reassure me. Gurathin coughed a little, struggling with it. Ratthi took the pipe from him, holding it as he watched. With a deeply pleasured sound, he exhaled the smoke.
"See?" Ratthi said. Gurathin nodded, still unable to speak. That was concerning to me. I leaned forward, eyeing the material. Ratthi misunderstood my motion and offered it to me casually. I took it.
"Is that safe?" Gurathin asked. They sounded nothing like Gurathin.
I was wondering the same thing (about whether it was safe), but more about whether it was safe for them to inhale it than anything about me. My entries about inhaled intoxicants were spotty, mainly focusing on how I should make sure I had a respirator in place or my helmet's filtration system. If humans were directly inhaling the vapor on a regular, recreational basis, then it couldn't be that dangerous. I took a deep sniff from the bowl, pulling the raw smoke into my mouth and nose where the sensory apparatus could do a study on it.
I wasn't sure what to make of it. Or how to describe it. 'Burning plant material' might be literally true, but it didn't smell like anything I was familiar with. It was very distinctive. Aromatic. Pungent. Spicy? I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it. Then, in what I would later realize was a perfect demonstration that I'd already been compromised, I decided to see if it was any different pulled through the filter. I turned the pipe and sucked smoke through it properly.
"Wait! Ah …" Gurathin looked frightened, like he was aware how stupid it was to give drugs to a SecUnit. I'd never seen that expression on his face. Wait, that wasn't Gurathin's face.
Ratthi looked amused. "I'm sure it's fine!" Ratthi reached out and took the pipe from me, taking another drag from it before he used a small tool to stamp out the smoldering ember in the bowl. "That's all we need anyway. I'm thinking this is a little stronger than what I've had before."
I exhaled. There was the same impulse to cough that Gurathin had shown (interestingly, Ratthi had not, either time). The sensation of the smoke seeping out my mouth and nose was interesting. I could see myself in the edge of the field of view of one of my drones. It looked creepy, like I was having the worst sort of malfunction or internal damage. But I was fine. Gurathin had said so.
I felt. Very fine. "This unit has been compromised," my buffer blurted out, along with a plume of smoke. "You should return this unit to the nearest cubicle as soon as possible." There was some other stuff the buffer wanted to say about voiding my warranty and the company not being responsible for damages, up to and including death, but I squelched it. No one needed to hear that.
Ratthi shook his head and waved a hand in the air dismissively. "No, no, you're alright. It's okay. The worst it will do is make you relaxed. I'm a biologist – I know this stuff. It's harmless."
"You shouldn't have let it take that," Gurathin said. He looked concerned. That still didn't sound like Gurathin. Or look like him. But I'd definitely tagged whoever it was as Gurathin.
Gurathin wasn't even at this party. Fuck.
Wait, where are my drones?
Gurathin was in my face. How did that happen? He said, "I need you to exhale." What the hell? He was right there. When was the last time I had a human's face this close to mine? His nose was lumpy. His lips were pursed, pressed together a little. Human lips were occasionally grossly wet but these looked dry. I was curious so I touched them with my fingers. He froze.
These were dry. And soft. They had a pleasing, silky texture. I leaned forward the unnecessarily short distance (really, what was Gurathin thinking getting up in my business like this?) and kissed him with all the awkwardness of someone who'd never done it before, meaning I mouthed over him with my lips. Humans did this all the time in media. He was still frozen. Then his lips moved – in response, I think – before he pulled back. "No. You're- not-" He shook his head.
Actually, his whole body appeared to be shaking. I reached out and grabbed the front of his shirt before he could get away. I pulled him close. He grunted a startled exhalation. Yes, he was definitely shaking. Maybe he was in shock. I upped my body temperature and held him there. He started to squirm after some seconds. I had him bent forward at the waist over my sitting form. "Murd- SecUnit-"
Simultaneous thoughts: 'Ha! He's so shaken up he forgot what to call me.' and 'Why the fuck would he think to call me that?' and 'Fuck. He's definitely in shock.'
I wrapped one arm around his upper back to stabilize him while I swept his legs out from under him with the other. I put him on my lap sideways so his entire torso was against mine. I held him there. He was barely breathing. I waited. He needed the oxygen, he'd breathe eventually. Then he did. He stopped trembling and slumped against me instead. That was better. I put my cheek against his forehead. I could feel the warmth of his head. His brain was in there somewhere doing brain things.
He fell asleep. So did I.
"SecUnit?" I startled awake, which was a new experience for me as I cannot fall asleep. Gurathin was no longer in my arms. He was leaning over me just like he had a few … somethings … ago? I couldn't find my internal chronometer.
"What time is it?" What I really wanted to ask was, 'What the fuck is going on?' but those weren't the words that came out of my mouth.
"I need you to exhale. Deeper."
I looked at his lips. Had that … Had that just happened? Had I imagined it? Why would I imagine that? I vaguely remembered thinking I might have shot someone and not being nearly as alarmed by that as I should have been. Before that I'd been at the party and before that I'd been at station security. Maybe?
I asked, "Is Ratthi alive? He's my friend." Had I taken him to station medical? I should have taken him to station medical, but I had the impression I hadn't. "My logs. I don't have them. Where are they?"
Gurathin leaned even closer to me (What the fuck, Gurathin?) and sniffed me repeatedly. He straightened. "Ratthi is fine."
"Where is he? Did I shoot him?"
"No, you didn't shoot him. You haven't endangered anyone. You're also fine. Just … stay there."
"Yeah, right, everything is fine, shut up about it." He did shut up about it, so I added, "I kissed you." That was guaranteed to get a response but all he did was cut his eyes at me uncertainly. "Don't look at me." He looked away, then continued to his seat on the couch – still without speaking, which was annoying. "We were holding each other, but it wasn't gross. Well, you were asleep. But I was holding you. Just now."
"I think you're hallucinating."
"I'm not even sure you're Gurathin." The tag said this was Gurathin, but I knew I couldn't trust it.
"SecUnit, it's alright. You're safe."
"Fuck you. I can't tell the time. I might have shot someone. I can't see Ratthi. Some asshole hacked me and deleted all my logs and feed chats. Where have I been? What have I done? Where's the company? Where's Bharadwaj? There can't be any worms here. No one gets to eat my clients!" I felt kind of angry. Just kind of. Like it was distant, an emotion someone else was feeling. "I'm scared." That one felt a lot closer.
"I'm with you, SecUnit." Gurathin's voice was softer, gentler. "I'm right here. It's going to be okay."
"You don't have to sound that way! I don't understand why you're way over there. I was holding you and you fell asleep and I did too and I liked that and now you're over there. You hate me."
"I don't hate you."
"I told you I hated you. I was lying. I lie a lot. You should know that."
"I … think you're being as truthful as you can be right now."
No. No. Absolutely not. I'm not sure who I sent that to, but I sent it a lot. There it was in the feed channel 572 times. There were also entries that looked suspiciously like I'd deleted something. Maybe that was where my logs had gone. Other-me wasn't very canny about covering my tracks, although it had stumped me for … some amount of time. Either that or I'd been hacked. I suppose I could have been hacked and they made it look like me. But it was probably me.
If I felt like someone was after me, it might have been because it was true. I had vague images of a slow-motion chase scene where I wandered around the station looking for something while Gurathin and Officer Tifany trailed along behind me at a casual stroll, like they were pretending they weren't after me. They were totally after me. It just wasn't important enough for me to run. Also, I'm not sure I could run. My balance was not good and walls kept showing up in front of me for no reason at all.
Indah might have been back there too at some point. I really don't know. They didn't get too close to me. There was something in my head about a cubicle and reinstalling my governor module and an evil, alien-remnant-contaminated version of ART had taken over station medical … I don't even know. It seemed fake even to me.
But now I was back in Gurathin's apartment. Or maybe I'd never left it. There was the chair. I sat in it. "I'm tired. I feel wrong. I shouldn't be tired. I'm jittery. Can I talk? Am I talking?" I checked the feed log. It was empty again, all whatever-hundreds-of-somethings in it were gone. My memory was borked. "I wish I'd say things."
"You're talking. It's okay. Is there anything I can do for you?" There was no one else here, only Gurathin. That felt new, like there had been someone else here. Maybe they'd just left?
Go to sleep on me. That was nice. "I don't hate you. I told Mensah it's not terrible and it's not terrible – I mean touching humans. I don't want to say anything else." Gurathin sat down on the couch and I immediately started talking again. "No, I know I didn't say it, but I meant it. I want you to sleep on me. Come here."
He got up and moved toward me uncertainly. "Sleep on you?"
"I don't hate you." What I should have said was that I wouldn't hurt him, but I was just blurting things out (and sometimes apparently not blurting them out), as surprised as anyone else about some of it. It was like that time when I'd had a whole conversation with Volescu without knowing it on the way out of that worm-pit. Except no worm this time and it was Gurathin and … I lost my train of thought.
When he was close enough, I took hold of him and put him on my lap like before. He was awkward but cooperative. He pointlessly muttered 'SecUnit' a few times. I got him situated, upped my body heat, and was happy. I told him that on the feed because I couldn't trust my mouth. I'm happy now.
He answered similarly. Okay. I don't know if you're able to retain this, but if you are I want it noted that I am trying to help by keeping you company while this wears off. Without using a MedSystem, it's going to take a while. You don't have the filtering apparatus of a full human body and you've declined the usual solution for this.
Shut up. Something about this turn in the conversation made me uncomfortable. It reminded me of the chase through the station. I was thinking maybe that had been real and I had been avoiding something dangerous I didn't want to do. You're talking too much for someone who is pretending to be asleep.
Ah, I didn't realize that was what I was doing. Sure, I can do that. I don't think he went to sleep. Or at least, I didn't have any record of his vitals dropping off. Instead I had a long discontinuous portion of my own memories, as though I had fallen asleep. Again.
I was back on ART, trying to piece together its memories from the Adamantine colony/grey people attack, but now they were my memories and ART kept telling me I was doing it wrong. Dr. Mensah and Amena were there, along with ART's crew, and they were watching me fuck it up. I had a drone on each of them so I could watch in real-time as they winced and made faces every time I did something wrong, which was a lot. It was frustrating and embarrassing.
I just … fine, it wasn't that important. I'd lost memories before, years and years of them. I could just ignore this entire section, right? Nothing important was happening … right?
ART was not happy about me giving up. It was talking to me, but I couldn't make out what it was saying, probably because it wasn't really there and I was just imagining this bit. (Yeah, I'd figured out a lot of this was fake. Which felt like quite the accomplishment on my part.)
With what felt like an absurdly excessive effort, I clawed my way out of the dream. I was in Gurathin's quarters, still holding him, which was nice. I locked my joints so I wouldn't do anything stupid and he couldn't get away. I needed to fix this. I couldn't keep my humans and augmented human safe if I couldn't fix this. So I initiated a shutdown cycle.
Fuck, I should have done that a long time ago.
The very faint chime of the restart process woke Gurathin from where he'd been dozing on the couch. He sat up and rubbed his face as SecUnit came back online. He was glad it had finally shut itself down, and worried it might not have been enough. It was silent for a considerable amount of time. This was a huge improvement over the multi-channel babbling it had engaged in before. He didn't press it.
When it spoke, it was in an incredulous tone. "A fully armed murderbot with no kill switch was roaming the station, too compromised to know where it was, who it was with, or what it was doing, and you just … let it? You must have volunteered to follow me around. That's not brave. It's stupid, Gurathin."
"I'm glad you're enough in possession of your faculties to be insulting again."
"Fuck you." But there was little heat to it. "I could have killed you. You should have …" It trailed off, expression looking affected. Touched. Concerned. Exasperated.
"If you'd been a danger to anyone," Gurathin said, "we would have done something. We thought it would agitate you less if it was only one person with you."
"I was a danger to everyone, especially you. You should have immobilized me."
"The last time I tried that went badly." Not that it hadn't been suggested by Indah, particularly after it had stomped out of station medical raving about alien-installed governor modules. "You had free reign of the station and you didn't hurt anyone."
SecUnit scowled and said, "I kissed you!" like that disproved his statement.
Gurathin hesitated. It had mentioned that before, and for once in the time he'd known it, without revulsion. Which stood in contrast to the paranoia it had repeatedly voiced that he might have sex with it while it was vulnerable. "No, you didn't."
"I held you. I know I did."
"No," he said slowly. Again, SecUnit didn't sound like holding him had upset it. Not that it had happened. He'd been very careful not to touch it or be touched by it, fully aware of how strong it was and how currently unsound of judgment. "You didn't."
"Why would I imagine that? What does it mean?" It sounded pleading, like a reversion to the emotionally friable state it had been in before the shutdown.
"SecUnit," he said with the same patience he'd given it all night, "it doesn't have to mean anything. Nothing you saw or did while impaired needs to have any ongoing meaning. Your memories were corrupted, but you're probably okay now. Can you provide me with a diagnostic so I can see?"
It did, immediately. The time stamp showed it had been initiated within a second of restart. He reviewed it. "Everything looks clear." He sent an update to the team. Ratthi, especially, had been beating himself up about the situation. Mensah had been on standby for the next shuttle up if Gurathin hadn't been able to keep SecUnit calm. Indah had pulled in extra officers in case anything bad happened. They deserved to know.
SecUnit was staring forward, looking lost. "What if I wanted it to mean something?" It turned to look at him searchingly. He dropped his eyes to its knees. It was good that SecUnit's first priority upon restarting had been figuring itself out with the diagnostic. Given the line of questioning, it was still doing that, just in a different way. He had to resist the temptation to make more of this than it probably was.
"Most of the time when humans take psychoactive drugs, it's to intentionally experience an altered state of consciousness. With that can come lowered inhibitions, differences in judgment, or differences in perception. I …" He paused, looking for a value-neutral phrasing. "What it means – it means your mind wanted to consider different angles on that topic, and it used the effects of the drug to do so."
SecUnit didn't speak. It was still looking at him intently.
He couldn't tell if SecUnit had found this hallucination of intimacy to be a confusing self-betrayal, or thought Gurathin was lying and something had actually happened between them, or maybe it had enjoyed it. But what he could tell was it mattered a lot to SecUnit. "Was it a good thing to imagine or a bad one?"
"It made me feel safe enough to do a shutdown so my systems could purge the contaminants faster."
Gurathin's eyes jumped to SecUnit's chest. His expression softened at the idea that thinking about holding or being held had made SecUnit feel so safe. "That sounds profoundly good." He hazarded a glance at SecUnit's face and was relieved to see no disagreement there.
It was quiet for a long beat, then said haltingly, "I was … happy. That way. I didn't know I could feel happy." Its brows drew together. "I'm not even sure I did feel happy. Maybe I just … thought I felt happy."
"You told me you were happy at one point. I remember that."
Its head snapped up. "When?"
"It was during one of your more lucid periods near the end. I tried to explain to you why I was keeping you company, but then you told me I was supposed to be pretending to be asleep. So. Maybe not very lucid."
"I remember that. I was holding you."
It had not been, but it knew that. "If you want to explore that, to see what it really feels like, I'm willing." It had rambled about Dr. Mensah in a way that retrospectively sounded like disappointment that she'd turned down hugging it. It didn't want anything 'gross' like sex, but being held and handled gently was a very basic need for social creatures. SecUnits were definitely social. He gave it a moment of eye contact before looking away. "If that's something you'd like."
"Yes."
There was something in the way it said it that prompted him to ask, "Right now?" He'd thought, you know, maybe in a few days. Or weeks. Or never. Probably never. Not … now.
"Yes." Okay, 'now' it was.
Well. He took another quick look at the diagnostic. SecUnit appeared to be of sound mind. Hopefully that meant safe for physical contact, though he would have been more comfortable if it had gone through a calibration exercise before touching him. Too late for that without looking reluctant, which he absolutely did not want to do.
It seemed to have a clear idea of how it wanted him – sitting across its lap, gathered in against its chest, his head on its shoulder, its cheek against his forehead. It was not especially soft or comfortable, but it was warm. And soothing. Gurathin settled in and let his eyes shut. It had been a far more stressful night than he'd admitted to himself. It was holding him now, arms resting lightly around him. He felt safe. He didn't need to be wary anymore. He wondered if it was happy.
As if in response to that, it said quietly, "Yes. I like this." Which was close enough.