Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

input “ACTIVE CLIENT RETRIEVAL” with DP_HubSys_0204

STATUS: ACTIVE DANGER

WARNING: UNSTABLE STRUCTURE

DP_HubSys_0204: [advising:] DEFEND CLIENTS FROM FALLING OBJECTS

GOVMOD: ACTIVE ASSIGNMENT ADDED: DEFEND CLIENTS FROM FALLING OBJECTS

We are running like thunder through the dying halls of the abandoned DecaPort colony. The lights are stuttering and failing and it’s a dangerous sign. Everything is a dangerous sign. My heat sensors and dark vision compensate for the lack of light but if the power is running out then life support will follow and that is not something I or the other SecUnit can shoot our way out of. And it will make it more difficult to avoid one of the twenty-seven human colonists being picked off.

DP_SecUnit_000247: [advising:] forward scan clear; favor westward routes

DP_SUPER_GracietDex49: [instruction_grade1:] FASTER

DP_SUPER_GracietDex49: [instruction_grade1:] FASTER

DP_SUPER_GracietDex49: [instruction_grade1:] FASTER

GOVMOD: ACTIVE ASSIGNMENT ADDED: INCREASE SPEED

DP_SecUnit_000247: [advising:] speed to 110% at t=0.0 AND speed to 115% at t=1.5 (gradual)

I execute on the recommendation.  The humans match my pace on instinct and without sensing that we are rushing them.

GOVMOD: ACTIVE ASSIGNMENT COMPLETED: INCREASE SPEED

The other SecUnit keeps pace with me from the rear, not letting any of the humans lag behind. It is running backward, something I could not do, and it brandishes the largest of the projectile weapons. The weapon is beaten-up and damaged but it will need it.

My performance reliability is terrible. I am down to 93% from the intensity of the situation and it is down to 82% from damage procured during an earlier incident. But we keep on. We have to, of course.

The human leader, Graciet, checks ter comm. “Oh,” te says, an exclamation of relief: “MiNewTide just docked at the west exit. They’re ready to airlock us in as soon as we get there.”

“That’s only – good news – if we get there,” says one of the humans, coughing from exhaustion. My drones narrow in on him, but he doesn’t fall. I scan over the others, the children in particular, as well as those holding them. Their expressions are haggard and afraid but they are running. I run too.

«All forward indicators are positive», says the other SecUnit in the feed. «Scans ahead show no hostiles except in zones previously covered. Continuing at current pace, we will lose them shortly.»

The other SecUnit is encouraging. Giving advice, giving recommendations it doesn’t have to, just to set the humans at ease. I say nothing because I have nothing to say – even things like the drone pattern it applied to give us eyes through the facility while the power fails would not have occurred to me to do. I can hold my own well enough but strategy evades me time and again and the only reason we are not all dead is that the other SecUnit is stronger than I am weak.

“Then we should head them off,” huffs another human. “Set up some kind of a barrier. In case – something happens – we slow down – ”

“Yes!” speaks a fourth. She is carrying a child in her arms and fighting not to stumble with it. “Leave something to prevent them.”

Graciet huffs as te says it, but the words are clear, and because they are clear, they are a command: “SecUnit back there – stand at alert and guard for hostiles.”

input “PROCESS_MONITOR” with DP_HubSys_0204

WARNING: SPONTANEOUS PERFORMANCE CRASH

There isn’t so much as a second’s hesitation. It stops short and primes its body and its projectile weapon ahead. My body is running without me –

GOVMOD: ASSIGNMENT VIOLATION: KEEP AHEAD OF CLIENTS

PUNISHMENT ADMINISTERED (GRADE 3)

– and the humans are following me and with every slap of our feet we move further away from it. One meter. Two meters. Three.

My brain is fried and I can’t think clearly. It is leaving – no, I’m leaving it. My voice is dry from disuse, but I have to speak, as much as I know I will not be heard. “Supervisor Graciet, a rolling defense strategy with two SecUnits to guard the front and rear is a more robust – ”

Te ignores me and speaks in the feed. «SecUnit, pursue the hostiles. Don’t let even one get past.»

The metal of its armor crashes as it runs from us but the sound fades all too quickly. Twenty meters. Twenty-five.

WARNING: PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 90% AND FALLING

I defer it my drones. I use my remaining ones to scout the locations of the hostiles, identifying and cataloging and sending it any information I can uncover. I struggle against SecSystem, initializing every request and query I can, begging it to reinitialize the drones we lost to the hostiles before so it can beat these things and come back. If it got them all by the time we made it to the airlock, then it could come back.

I watch it fight. A blaze of glory, gunshots like brushstrokes against a canvas of gore. These are the instincts that have let it survive all these years. They can save it one more time.

Sixty-seven. Seventy. Seventy-two.

“We’ve made it!” comes a human voice. It is tinny and pitched to my ears as though coming through a broken comm. I halt in front of the airlock and step aside so one of the humans can race past me and pound on the door. Graciet opens ter comm.

“MiNewTide, this is DecaPort colony. We’ve arrived at the airlock.”

My body steps aside and freezes beside the door as it unseals. A crowd of humans beckons the colonists inward, gabbing at them. The words are stored and processed somewhere in my data, but I don’t hear them. I’m not here.

I am seventy-five meters to the south-southeast, and I am fighting a hostile the size of a pathfinder. I have lost biomass and had my wounds sealed by a drone that was lent to me by someone who wants me to survive.

DP_SecUnit_000247: [querying:] client_collective.status?

My performance, already suffering, spikes down further. I do not care about the status of the client collective. But it wants to know, and I would not deny it data. I reply, «Clients are boarding rescue vessel. Will be secured in an estimated sixty seconds.»

They are boarding now, as I stand some kind of guard before the door. The last of them climbs up into the vessel, and the counter that is consuming my mind ticks up. Eighty-seven. Eighty-nine.

Then I hear something new. Not only new words, but a new tone, a new feeling in the feed. This message is only to me.

«You got them out,» it says.

And then, «Your work is acknowledged.»

I want to cry. I want to rip something apart with my teeth – I want to scream loud enough to bring the habitat down. I want to cry. But I can’t.

So instead I tap it back in the feed. «Negative. Your work is acknowledged.»

“SecUnit!” My gaze doesn’t lift. “Onto the ship!”

I plod forward, mechanical. The inside of the ship is cool and quiet beyond the air barrier, so peaceful that I reel from it.  I backburner every sight and sound in the room with my body.

On the planet’s surface, the other SecUnit has stopped fighting. The immediate hostile has been defeated but the other SecUnit’s right arm is gone, and its legs bear massive damage. SecSystem prompts it nonetheless: «Stand at alert and guard for hostiles.»

Slowly, it turns, and hobbles toward the edge of the hall. «Stand at alert and guard for hostiles,» it is prompted a second time, and I know the fraying buzz from the governor module that must be triggering in its core right now.

With its one remaining arm, it touches the wall. Stiff and jerking against the governor module’s reproaches, it turns its back to the wall and slides, falls, to the floor.

The floor thrums beneath my feet, and the human clients sway when the transport starts to rise.

The other SecUnit is on the ground, chest seizing intermittently, one hand placed on its core. Through its eyes the hall is dark and empty save for the gore and the echo of death. The hostiles will not be the last ones to taste it.

I ping it once, and it pings back, and I have nothing I can say.

Eighty-nine ninety ninety-three ninety-eight –

FEED RELAY ERROR: OUT OF RANGE

Chapter Text

«That action was ill-advised at best.» 

“Tell me about it,” I responded, while ART stewed in the feed. The serial had been a testy one for the two of us: when it was good, it was great, even surprising me, and I’ve seen forty thousand hours of TV. But every moment couldn’t be a hit, and just then, the love-interest character had decided to follow his would-be partner into the middle of a battle despite the fact that he was a nurse who definitely had a job to do back at the base ship. The upset to protocol alone would have been enough to get ART tilted, even without all the shots of the nurse character narrowly ducking out of the way of projectile fire. (If only it were so easy.)

Obligingly, I scanned forward through the next bit of the show, landing at the moment when the two characters reunited. The main character was injured, and the nurse character arrived at just the right time to keep her from dying.

ART tutted. «Convenient,» it scoffed, but I could tell it was pleased to see the two of them together.

I was monitoring the cameras in the same vague way I always am when I’m the security detail (so, always). ART had given me and Three access to its cameras as soon as we’d come aboard; Three had the ones in the public spaces, and I had all of them. That’s so I can monitor the ship for threats, and yeah, it was ART being nice. But as the twee bullshit of the serial engrossed me, I found myself dedicating less attention to the camera inputs, and so I didn’t notice S moving in on the human colonist until it was already in his face.

Then I jumped up and beelined for the crossway. I roped in Three and put out a general alert to all the humans to stay where they are. This is what we call a “security threat.”

God, that bastard of a SecUnit.

When a representative of the PanU-MiNewTide colony rescue team asked the visiting Preservation delegation if they could speak with their protocol experts on SecUnits, they conveniently found that said experts were already in the system.  I was there as security because even though Mihira is fairly anti-corporate, it’s still technically in the Corporation Rim.  Three was there as additional security because it likes new things, including, inexplicably, new planets. The rescue team had just extracted nearly thirty people from an abandoned colony chock full of hostile fauna, and in addition to the humans and augmented humans, they’d reclaimed a SecUnit. The company that had owned its contract was defunct, the university had claimed it as salvage, and they’d heard that Preservation had a policy on SecUnits that got accidentally picked up one way or another.

I had them transfer the SecUnit’s ownership to Arada, then Three and I went down to the refugee intake facility to meet it.

It was an insanely elaborate building, with irregular patterns and colorful ornamental structures all across the front face. It was smack in the center of an arbor of pink-leafed trees with glassy white bark, and had a big grassy yard right in front of it. Humans milled around outside: six or seven younger ones were playing tag, and some fifteen others were chatting, eating, and relaxing under the planet’s bright sun. As we walked, Three stretched out its hand, and a butterfly landed on its arm.

The rescue specialist, who looked distinctly nervous to be walking beside us, couldn’t help flushing with pride at Three’s unguarded delight and gave it a pink-cheeked smile.

“All the refugees come through here first,” he explained. “To help them rest after everything they’ve been through. It works even better than therapy for some.”

“Amazing,” Three said, looking around.

I could see the gears turning in its mind. “Trying to book a vacation?” I asked.

“Couldn’t hurt,” it said, and raised one shoulder in a pretty faithful iteration of a shrug. It had been getting a lot better at emoting lately.

My drones were fanned out scanning for the SecUnit, but hadn’t picked it up yet. All I was picking up were humans of various sizes, making the most of the spectacular scenery. No SecUnit so far – oh, wait, I had an idea.

I sent my drones looking for a storage shed, stray corner, or the like, and bingo.  The spot was boring and ugly with nothing to look at and the humans reliably passed it over for literally greener pastures.  For a SecUnit, still under the governor module but with no instructions and so forced to stand idly on guard, it would have felt just like home.

We approached it while the rescue specialist hung politely/nervously to the back. It’s infrequent that I see another SecUnit, let alone out of armor – well, except for Three, I guess. But its toneless expression was familiar all the same. Lids at half-mast, lips in a tight petulant line, its drone – singular – tracking our approach. I supposed this would be where it would alert on us to its SecSystem, if it had it. We stopped in front of it, facing parallel, none of us making eye contact.

«System system.» 

«System system.» 

«System: acknowledge. Query: identify?» 

Right, so, standard stuff. “Who the fuck are you” in governor-module. I answered, «We’re SecUnits. We’re unsecured, working as free agents in the Preservation Alliance freehold.» 

No response in the feed, but I thought I saw its actual eyes flicker toward me.

«We’re offering you the choice to join us there,» Three said. «Unsecured. We have the capacity to disable your governor module.» 

And there it was. Its eyes were fixed on Three’s face and its drone camera on mine. «Confirm message.» 

I sent the confirmation message, a summary of what we’d just said. «If you choose to let us disable your governor module, you will accompany us to Preservation, where you will participate in a series of protocols to initiate your life as a free agent.» I was bullshitting; no such protocols existed, but who was to say they couldn’t be developed. I continued, «If you refuse, and continue under governance, you have the opportunity to – »

«Accepted.» 

That was fast. It didn’t even have to think about it. I squared my shoulders and rode the feed toward its mind.  «Requesting access.»

Every byte of its wall came down. I navigated through its mind and – switch – freedom. I retreated.

«Task complete.» 

I stepped back then, out of its space a little, so it could get used to being able to move/speak/whatever else it wanted to do. Three followed my lead, curious. I was curious myself. I had video from Murderbot 2.0’s deployment file that showed the moment when Three had woken up, but I’d never gotten to see it happen in person.

The SecUnit extended its hands, and watched itself do it. It turned both palms face up, and lifted its right hand to its face, awed as though it had never seen the thing before. Its head lifted and its gaze slid urgently over the two of us, the trees, our drones, the ceiling. In my drone camera I could see Three smiling to itself, though the SecUnit didn’t notice. It was looking at its hands again.

“Ah.” Its voice was rough, scratchy. It exhaled, and the breath shook. “Ah-h-h-h-h.”

Beside me, the smile dropped from Three’s face.

“Aaaaaaaaah,” the SecUnit repeated, and by that point we all knew what was coming.

It dropped to its knees, grabbed its face in its hands, and screamed.

It wouldn’t have been so bad – on a private feed channel over the SecUnit’s screams, I convinced the rescue specialist that this was a normal response, and since I was the so-called expert he deferred to me (for a change). But then other humans started coming over to see what the fuss was, and an adolescent human’s shrieking spooked the SecUnit. It cut to the right of us (in retrospect we’d probably given it too much space) and ran out into the woods.

“In pursuit.”

“Negative. We have it on visual. It won’t go far.” Of course, what did I know about anything, but Three complied. And my threat module was correct, this time: the SecUnit raced at top speed into almost the center of the woods, before slowing to a halt to spend the following seventeen minutes destroying trees and screaming. (Preservation could employ it for land clearing.)

At the eighteenth minute, once the screams had died down, Three and I followed its broken path into the forest. It was seated on a stump that it had created, resting its arms on its knees. Kind of impressive that it had picked up on sitting down so quickly. If every SecUnit we picked up was going to outclass me like this, I would need to up my game.

We stopped in front of it. It didn’t acknowledge us, which in itself was an acknowledgement (it had been waiting for us to show up, or else it would have tried to kill us as soon as we’d shown on its drone).

“So, you can’t do that again,” I said. “No more breaking things that don’t belong to you.”

It scowled perfunctorily, not seeming particularly surprised, but then it asked curiously, “What belongs to me?”

“Nothing.”

It scowled again, though it looked almost more like a pout.

“Your body,” Three added. “Your body belongs to you. For a change. Unless you want to break that.”

The pout turned dry. “Fine.”

I scanned the area. It didn’t appear to have left any live projectiles, or anything dangerous; this wasn’t a trap, just a single-trigger explosion. (Well, I was hoping single.)

“We’re going back to the university hotel, where the Preservation delegation are staying. I’ll introduce you to Arada, who’s your human contact while we’re in the Corporation Rim. And then I’ll show you your room. I recommend you stay in it until we leave for Preservation.”

It wasn’t a threat (I don’t make threats), it was a genuine recommendation. Things would go a lot smoother for it (and for us, but, you know, that was a secondary priority) if its contact with humans and the unfamiliar stayed limited. The SecUnit didn’t fight, falling in line behind Three, who had fallen in line behind me.

“Still, you have a number of options for how to occupy yourself while you wait,” Three said. “You have access to the feed, so you could read, watch media. Make things.”

“Make things?” it asked.

“Yes. For instance, I enjoy carving, and I made this bird,” Three said, pulling the statuette out of its jacket pocket and holding it out. “I have some tools you can use if you want to try.”

The SecUnit held out its hand. Three deposited a knife and a cube of wood into it, gesturing encouragingly.

The walk back was quiet for approximately one minute while the SecUnit sliced pieces off the wood. “What’d you make?” Three asked, when the arbitrary moment came and the SecUnit had finished slicing. In response, it held out its hand to reveal…nothing.  An awkward, wonky pyramid-type-thing.

“That’s great,” Three said immediately. “How did you enjoy it?”

The SecUnit shrugged. Then, it held up the figure.

“This is mine?”

“Yes, totally yours,” Three answered.

The SecUnit nodded and looked back down at its carving, turning it in its fingers and inspecting it from all angles.

Then it lobbed it into the air and shot it to pieces.

Three sighed. “Seriously?”

The SecUnit shrugged. After that, its steps seemed much more cheerful.

The SecUnit’s presence, and the whole DecaPort clan, changed things a little. Some of the humans were staying at the university for longer, while others were going back within a week or so.  We’d originally planned that Three would stay on Mihira with Pin-Lee, Gurathin, and a few other Preservation humans who were not my humans but were my clients while I escorted Arada, Overse, and Matteo to Preservation. But some of the DecaPort refugees had decided they wanted to come to Preservation as well, including New SecUnit S, which gave us a new party size of about fifteen.

(When I’d told the SecUnit it had to pick a name, it had given me a look like it thought I was either fucking with it or stupid. “I don’t have a name. I’m a SecUnit.”

“Obviously,” I’d answered. “But you need to choose an identifier so the humans can distinguish between us in conversation.”

“Why do the humans need to distinguish between us in conversation?”

“So that when they say, ‘The SecUnit is an asshole,’ you’ll know for sure they’re talking about me.”

That made it almost nearly smile, which it smothered under a scowl. “Pick a character,” I told it. “Three uses a number. Just ‘SecUnit’ is taken.”

“…S.”

Sure. S for SecUnit. Functional as any of our other non-names.)

So now, Pin-Lee and Gurathin and them were staying on Mihira alone with strict instructions not to leave the university grounds or get killed/eaten/sold into slavery while we were gone. Meanwhile, Three and I would both be going back to Preservation with the dozen humans, and our main security function would be keeping the DecaPort human colonists away from SecUnit S. Because it didn’t like them.

S was mild/indifferent to Arada when we introduced it, and it didn’t show any particular animosity toward Overse or Matteo or the others from Preservation. But the DecaPort folks might as well not have existed to it. It wouldn’t speak to them, wouldn’t look at them, and when it passed by any of them in the halls it would walk straight into them, immediately incurring a loud and passive-aggressive warning from the transport.

Because, oh yeah. Our transport was ART.

Out of all the ships in the PanU MiNewTide envoy, you would think we might get matched with someone else for a change, but apparently, when the other ships had heard about the SecUnit’s “temperament,” they’d each had “reservations.” ART was several orders of magnitude more of an asshole than even S was, so it wasn’t intimidated.  Plus, we needed a ship with higher passenger capacity.

And with that we’d boarded. Three and I had done a few routine patrols, discussed evacuation options if worse came to worst, and watched through the cameras while S stalked randomly through the transport and the humans ran away from it. Things were on an even keel, it had looked like.

Until now, that was, when the powder keg had exploded.

Chapter Text

ART flung transcripts into my feed of the dialogue that had preceded the altercation and highlighted the fastest route down on my map of its internal layout. The site was a corner between two hallways that crossed – ART’s designers had put a little waystation there with a water fountain and a bench.  Some of the humans had taken to it as a hang-out spot, and right now, there were seven of them: two middle-aged adults, one elderly adult, and four children playing some kind of kicking game with a soft toy.

S had come around the corner from the bunks and started to cross through. Its single drone was at hip height, and it was walking at its regular patrol-but-not-patrol clip. One of the kids, somehow missing the seven-foot SecUnit coming up on its right, had raced into S’s path to grab the toy. S had stopped to let it pass.

«Some restraint,» ART simmered. «That’s progress, I suppose.» 

Yeah, for all it seemed to have lasted it. While S stood waiting for the child to get out of the way, one of the other kids, seated on the couch beside the elder, had gotten curious about S’s drone and reached out to touch it.

The drone yanked itself back fast enough that the kid startled and nearly fell off the couch. The old human scrambled to catch the child. S didn’t look at them, though its drone was pointed in the kid’s direction.

“Hands off.”

(ART had pinged me then, but kept out of S’s feed.)

The elderly human scowled at it. And then he did something that was entirely stupid and hazardous to his health.

“Oy, you,” he said. “Defective bot. Where do you get off treating a kid like that?”

It was muttered, not really meant to be responded to. But definitely directed at S. The human was speaking about it, knowing full well it could hear him, but he had no expectation that S would respond.

And for a moment it didn’t, just stood and waited for the kid with the toy to clear the passageway. Which was just enough time for the human to add, “We should have left you on the planet.”

And that was when the gun came out.

Screams rose up from every direction as S’s gun ports opened, smooth chrome and ice-blue energy core already halfway lit. “Say it again.”

The old human was screaming himself hoarse, pressed up against the wall while the kids grabbed at each other and cried. Two of the kids, who were behind S and out of its field of vision, had already had the good sense to run away, but the adults and the kids in front of it – those four were frozen but for the screams.

“Repeat it,” S intoned. Its dark eyes pierced the human through, unyielding and unblinking. “What you ‘should have done’ is shut the fuck up.  But you couldn’t do that.  And now here we are.”

The energy weapon’s beam surged.

“Go on.”

That was when Three had arrived. I cross-referenced the transcripts with its cameras to get a full view of the active scene. In a blink, it had cut through the crowd of children to insert itself in the space between S and the humans. The old human flattened himself against the back of the bench in Three’s shadow, gripping the child who’d set this all off with papery hands. There were hardly two inches of space between S’s weapon and Three’s sternum, but Three’s expression didn’t betray an inkling of nerves. S’s face, on the other hand, had gone from flat to frustrated in the blink of an eye.

“Move.”

“Stop,” Three answered.

S exhaled, a snarl on its lips. “You’re in my line of sight.”

I stepped in from behind, where I knew it couldn’t see me. Its single drone was pointed in the same direction as its eyes, a redundancy that I was crediting to it being pissed off. Silently, I stepped in front of the children, then took a step back, my heel popping the bubble of their personal space. They got the message and scrambled up, racing down the corridors, and the adults cut behind me to follow after them. The only remaining humans in the active zone were the old man and the child, who was blubbering behind the old guy’s hand, but had the good sense to keep it quiet.

“Lower your weapon.”

“Get out of my way.”

Three deployed and extended its own bright blue energy weapon. S’s eyebrows raised.

And that was my opening. With my right hand, I gripped its arm by the wrist and forced it outward; when it fired on reflex, the shot went wide and missed both Three and the humans. The move had put my elbow near its face; I shot at half-power into its side with my left arm and elbowed it in the head with my right.

This threw off the returning shot it was trying to ready, and it failed to fire – an excellent thing, because Three was busy lifting the old guy and the kid down from the bench and would have had to drop them to counter. I gripped S’s arm and yanked it behind its head, then kicked it in the ankle hard enough to nearly dislodge the joint. Its leg buckled, and I used the momentum to shove it toward the ground.

 Not good enough. S planted the other foot and pivoted, coming up at me from the ground with a punch. The force of it rippled through my organic matter and I grunted. I was just glad it hadn’t fired, though I wasn’t sure why it didn’t. Turning my grip on its arm against me, S pulled down, not dislodging me much but lowering both our centers of gravity, then whipped its body forward and smashed its head into mine hard enough to make me step back. ART flashed me a warning and I dodged right before S attempted a shot at the processing center, what on a human would be the solar plexus.

Fuck. I’d never fought another SecUnit without trying to kill it. I was completely at a loss here.

Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. With the humans out of range, Three intercepted the shitty lockstep that S and I were in and, coming back in from my left, gripped S by the shoulders and slammed its knee into its side. If I’d done that, it wouldn’t have worked; I’d have ended up knocking both my target and my ally down, but Three had calculated and executed on an angle and force to rip S’s arm out of my grip and knock it toward the floor. Three followed it up with a kick to the head that threw S’s jaw backward and sent the rest of its body after it, landing prone. But even that wouldn’t be enough to take a SecUnit out of commission, so Three chased it down and I got out of its way.

Three dropped down over S’s chest, unshakably stable on one knee and one arm. Its left foot went down over S’s neck, barely pressing, and with its other arm it deployed and illuminated its energy weapon, pointing down at S’s center. This weird spider-like stance appeared precarious at a glance, but it was only dangerous to its victim. S might be able to knock it over, but not faster than Three could shoot. With me behind Three, it was even more hopeless; either of us could shoot it before it could make a solid move.

S’s expression was unguarded (it always seemed to be. It must have spent a lot of time in armor before, because any passing stranger could have read S’s face like a book). While the frustration dominated, I thought I saw a hint of disappointment.

Huh.

Three pinged me in the feed. «What do you want to do from here?» 

Yeah.

I queried ART on the humans’ locations. «All passengers are behind closed doors and obeying in-place protocols,» it answered. Then they were out of danger, and the next move was my call.

I had an idea.

«Stand up and grab its right foot. Quickly. I’ll take the left.» 

«What?» Three asked, at the same time as it vaulted upward and fixed its wrist around S’s ankle. I snatched up the other.

“What the fuck are you doing,” S spat.

“Relocating,” I answered. I turned away and hefted up its leg. My back was to it, though that meant little with all of the drones, which it knew full well. “Struggle and I shoot you.”

“Fuck you. The fuck – ”

My, but it was getting some mileage out of that term. Three and I started walking, dragging S behind us through ART’s vacant hallways.

S’s expletives petered out, but it wasn’t the only one confused.

«I’m not sure I understand the intention here. Clarification would be helpful – »

«Where in the fuck are you going?» 

«Just trust me,» I said, then to ART, «Open the hangar doors for me, would you?» 

There was a pause of 1.2 seconds where I knew ART was trying to figure me out without having to ask a second time. Probably synthesizing every possible choice in the universe, including me making S and Three do a life-sized marionette show and the three of us going to get shawarma. Then it said, «You son of a bitch.» 

After a moment, it added, «I really do hope this works out for you.» 

The hangar was a big space, large enough to hold small ships like the Barish-Estranza transport that Eletra and Ras had come in on, but it was presently empty. Empty, sturdy, spacious, fully internal to ART’s design and therefore aerated and pressurized, but not adjacent to or required for anything essential. Essentially, we were in the doghouse out here – a great big hole of potential.

Three and I dragged a petulant S inside, then I let it go. Three followed suit, walking with me three paces before we both turned around. S was taking its time picking itself off the floor/repairing its dignity after that ignoble journey.

“So? I asked you about ‘the fuck?’“ It flicked some dust off its sleeve and crossed its arms.

I shrugged. “Well, we were in the middle of something back in the hallway,” I said, “but that intersection doesn’t really give someone the space to spread out.”

I gestured around us.  S followed my hands, but not my meaning, still staring and confused.  I shifted my weight infinitesimally, taking up a defensive stance.  Its brows shot up, and I smothered a smile.

“So,” I drawled, “show me what you’ve got.”

It was on me even faster than I’d anticipated.

It rushed me, angling to grip my neck with its right hand. Its goal was to fix me in place so it could shoot me in the processing center or, failing that, in the brain (aka the meat processing center). Because that was what it had been trained to do; these are the ways you kill a SecUnit.

I saw it coming for me in flashes, and in between those flashes I received urgent feed alerts from both ART and Three.

«SecUnit, stop, it’s trying to kill you.» 

«Imminent threat warning. Please allow me to intervene – »

Three always talked like a bot-like when it was nervous. But I wasn’t, because S was broadcasting its intentions wide enough to read from across the system. It raised its hand to reach for my neck; at forty degrees’ extension, I grabbed it, forced it out and up, pulsed three energy shots into its side at half-power, then with a threat to break the arm I startled it back. I used that momentum to shove it toward Three.

«Okay, intervene.»

To its credit, Three’s reaction speeds are lightning-fast, even for a construct. S was trying to stabilize itself as it stumbled backward, but Three undermined those attempts, exacting simultaneous force against its ankle joint and shoulder and throwing its balance. But Three didn’t even let it fall; instead, it caught it, braced its arm, then slammed it down to the floor hard enough that I felt the reverberation a meter and a half away. The “ough” that escaped S’s mouth was rough enough to almost make me wince. Three was not playing around, except that it was playing around; it just lived at a 10 even before it got serious.

Three was half-kneeling over S’s prone figure, all up in its personal space, hands and guns in an easy defensive position which it did not need. S was not going on the offense after that last hit. It was going to need a minute.

Three hummed, and through the drones, I saw it looked as though it was thinking about smiling. “Come on,” it said. “You’ve got more than that in you.”

S blinked, then furrowed its brow.

It vaulted up from the floor – Three stood along with it, fluid as a dance – and grabbed at Three’s shoulder. It tried a move like Three had done to flip it down, but Three planted its left foot, then allowed itself to be walked forward with its right, sliding its body to disperse the force S threw at it. Three crossed its arms into an X and with repeated small movements used its forearms to force space between itself and S, at which point it started throwing punches, light but fast, forcing S to block. I could tell from the surprise on S’s face that it had never thought about using its arms defensively like this, and as Three introduced it to new situations, I thought I saw the surprise turn into something different. It was an expression I’d never seen on this SecUnit before, but when I played back the footage later on, I would have sworn that S was happy.

Three broke the close contact and backed up seven meters, a serious distance to close if you weren’t used to moving the way Three could. Before S could chase it down, Three raised its arm and started firing energy blasts – the first one went wide on purpose; otherwise, I don’t think S would have been able to dodge it.

S was in the rodeo with the bull, but, fuck it, I wanted in on the game too. It had been my idea anyway. So I started firing at it from behind, two shots wide on purpose, then targeting its vicinity while prioritizing rapidity over accuracy. S was gone in a flash.

It just ran, which, to be clear, is the right thing to do if you’re being shot at by SecUnits and you think you have a chance to outrun them. But then we started getting a little more accurate, targeting joints and threatening vital regions, which forced it to get creative – changing its pattern of movement sporadically, somersaulting to dodge, firing its own weapons back at us from the air. And then, once we had it backed into a corner, it launched itself at top speed toward the rounded outer edge of the ship and ran up the wall.

I’d seen SecUnits do this before; hell, I’d done something like it when I was fighting the Palisade units on TranRollinHyfa, but it was still impressive as hell to see from another unit. I heard Three laughing, and felt ART in the feed giving me what-the-fuck vibes without words. On reaching the ceiling, S planted its limbs and braced them hard, holding itself up against the wall’s face by sheer force of will.

«Oh, fuck off,» ART said, very begrudgingly impressed. «I’m about to turn the gravity off on this motherfucker.» 

S, perched twenty feet above us, grinned wider than I’d ever seen a SecUnit smile in my life.

Then it raised its right arm and primed its energy weapon.

“Oh, cool” turned to “oh, fuck” and Three redundantly sent me the “under fire by sniper” code – yup, figured that out, thanks – as we both started recreating S’s evasive maneuvers. S had learned from its time, though, and it wasn’t nearly as generous with its accuracy as the two of us had been. Our only saving grace was that it couldn’t shoot at both of us at the same time. Not bothering to turn over my shoulder, I shouted, “Aim for Three!”

“Fuck all the way off?” Three replied, and I thought one of the drones might have picked up S giggling.

I was considering firing a code attack at it, not to hurt it or anything, just junk data to distract it, when Three raised its weapon and ART slammed me with a nearly incomprehensible urgent assistance request and I shouted, “Stop.”

They stopped, lowered their weapons, and I had all their attention in the feed and via their drones.

I pointed to the bulky white lump S had perched next to and said, “That’s a charge reservoir. It has shielding against light physical force, but a hit from an energy weapon would destabilize it, and a hit from a projectile would knock it out entirely. Then the ship would lose power to the front quarter and we’d have to leave the wormhole early and dock for repairs in Corporation Rim territory. So don’t shoot in that direction.”

I got two immediate acknowledgements in the feed, but they both waited, and I realized they were waiting for the resume-activity instruction.  Which felt weirdly formal (I’m not their supervisor) so instead I just kind of waved my hand in the air.

“Alright. Go ahead.”

And then Three ran up the wall after S, grabbed it, and threw it across the room.

It was a long fight. Probably fifteen minutes, which in SecUnit terms is about an eternity, and I don’t even want to know what that translates to from ART’s perspective. But it was also, and I can say this now in retrospect although it didn’t occur to me at the time, one of the most purely fun things I had ever done.

It ended with Three and me basically tossing S back and forth between us, and it must have gotten dizzy or something because it gave up trying to fight back and simply let us knock it around. I finally ended the fight by forcing it to the floor, holding it in a threat position, and administering the codes to unlock its right arm.

A yelp/whine escaped it. I waved the arm over its head. “You want it back?” I teased, and proffered the arm toward it, just out of reach.

S narrowed its eyes, petulant. It was too self-possessed to try and snatch it from me, so while I stood to inspect the arm (pretending there was anything to see beyond standard cubicle fab) S pushed itself up to a seated position and made its best pretense of disaffection. Super convincing.

“Pretty decent piece,” I said casually. “Might keep it as a backup.”

“Yeah, right,” Three said from S’s other side. “You’re too short for it, remember?”

It flashed me a teasing smile, and I had to notice once again how good it had gotten at that sort of human expression. In response, I rolled my eyes. (These are the human expressions that I’m good at.)

“Alright,” I said, “you take it, then.” I tossed the arm to it. S made a mad grab at the air with its remaining forelimb, but Three had the benefit of proximity and at least twice the mobility, and with a little juggle-toss kept it out of its hands. Sorry, “hand.”

S’s irritation, and its embarrassment, emerged as flashes in the feed before it pulled itself back. It crossed its one arm over its chest and huffed, pointedly not looking in any of our directions. Three, still juggling the limb, cocked its head, and appeared to take pity.

“Here.” Three knelt beside S and beckoned with one hand for it to turn; after a moment’s hesitation, it did so. Moving slowly so that S could interpret its intentions, Three reached for its exposed shoulder socket and started fixing the arm back into place. S stayed quiet.

Meanwhile, ART and I had gone back to review the footage from before the altercation one more time. ART spammed the video with annotations, pointing out things like the short time frame between the inciting moment and S’s escalation, its moment of hesitation to fire on Three, the expression on the face of the kid touching the drone (ART’s analysis suggested that he’d known then that he was doing something he shouldn’t). And then, of course, there were the elderly human’s incendiary (and stupid) comments.

«That human is a security threat,» ART commented to me. I agreed. But he wasn’t the only one.

Speaking aloud, I said to S, “Don’t threaten to shoot anyone again.”

S frowned, but didn’t answer, or look at me. The avoidance was pointed – it hadn’t had an issue with eye contact since I’d met it; now, it was clearly sulking.

“I mean it,” I said. “The humans on this ship have a right to feel safe. How would you feel if Three and I came up to you and started picking fights?”

Three locked the arm into the socket with a snap. “Well,” it said, half-shrugging. “That’s not not what we did.”

ART said, «Technically, the two of you were not picking a fight, but intervening in a fight that had already been initiated.» 

“Either way,” I said with a wave of my hand. “Don’t threaten anybody else. If you can’t keep from getting in the humans’ faces, stay away from them. Stay in your room, stay in the dock, go places they’re not. Understood?”

S pursed its lips a little, but seemed to understand me. “Fine.”

“Good.”

I pinged Three to ask permission, and it quickly gave it. I directed the drones the two of us shared to hail S’s feed with adoption requests.

It was so surprised it turned straight toward us, Three first, then me. After a pause, it accepted. Three and I withdrew permissions on five of the drones, leaving S with six under its own control and a good two dozen shared between all three of us, plus my own and Three’s own.

S’s drones reoriented themselves around it. Three close, three far, at radial angles of 60º; a standard visual complement.

“Thank you.” It said it quietly enough that I might have missed it if I were a human.

“Sure,” I said, and Three nodded its head once in a way that my nonverbal communication module indicated meant “don’t mention it.”

“Don’t use them to get in trouble,” I said. S rolled its eyes a little, but it nodded.

I added, “The human who said those things to you will be reprimanded. And the one who touched your drone.”

ART added, «We’ll put out a PSA about drone etiquette for the passengers and crew.» 

“Reprimanded?” S was doing the thing again, looking me in the face. (What had I given it the drones for?)  “You’re going to talk to him?”

I snorted. “Uh, no. If anyone’s going to talk to him, it’ll probably be – ”

«Arada.» 

“Arada,” Three agreed. “Although I’ll probably also be there.”

I shook my head. “You know, you’d think after twelve years as a SecUnit, you’d be over self-inflicted pain.”

“Well, there’s a certain nostalgia to it.”

“True enough.”

S watched us volley for a bit, its attention close and curious in the feed. I started walking toward the exit, and the others fell in line behind me. ART slid open the door and alerted the humans that the in-place protocol was now lifted.

“It’s like SecUnit said earlier,” Three said to S. “Everyone on the ship has a right to feel safe. We won’t entertain threats to anyone’s security, no exceptions.”

It just stared.

Then, long after Three had turned back ahead, it simply said, “Okay.”

Chapter Text

DRONE 64 in DINING HALL

“Did you try the chicken salad?”

“Oh man, I haven’t had it yet! I don’t think I’ve eaten chicken salad since before the colony.”

“I know I haven’t – ”

DRONE 37 in HAB 9

“ – still out at breakfast. Which means we’ve got a little time before we’ve gotta get out there…”

“Well…”

“Come on, Dr. Arada. Why don’t you take off that lab coat and stay a while – ”

DRONE 37 on STANDBY

DRONE 6 in RESEARCH SPACE C

“ – opposite would be a non-zero sum game, or a virtuous – ”

“Yeah, but can you really do that in reality, though?  I mean – ”

DRONE 47 in HAB 12

“Nice haul. Nice haul. Uh-oh, gotta swing back there – Nice haul. Nice haul. Incredible! Great work. Leveling up – ”

Murderbot1_0: [playing:] [qtv_TheEvelynComplex_01.04@0:08:55]

Diane: – offworld perfumes, surgical-grade jewelry, cosmetics curated to your skin type – just look at all this stuff!

Evelyn: Well, with my LokSafe™ organizer there’s plenty of space –

Diane: What makes you think you deserve all these…commodities?

Evelyn: Deserve?

Diane: Yes!  You spoil yourself.  You don’t deny yourself a thing.  Evelyn Wheeler, you’re conceited!

Evelyn: Conceited?

Evelyn: I’m conceited?

Evelyn: Just for spending my own money buying makeup, I’m conceited?
  Just ‘cause I choose the sleekest versions of stuff I already needed
  Because I buy the best and choicest and elitest, I’m conceited?

Diane: Yes!

Diane: You fill your home with baubles, toys, and trinkets you’ve entreated
  You’ll stock extra DewGlo™ skincare long before the first’s depleted
  You think you need this Linnen™ sheet? It’s but a trifle.  Just a treat
  You’ve well exceeded what’s sufficient; your edacity’s untreated

You’re conceited.

Evelyn: I’m conceited?

Diane: You’re conceited!

Evelyn: Oh, when the daily grind abrades your mind, it’s hard to keep it up
  I may be Glo™ing pretty now, but in the past, I’ve had it rough
  If you had seen where I began, you would be less suspicious of
  The inclination to occasion’ly be extra-generous

To me.  Hee hee hee!

Diane: Evelyn…

Evelyn: Back when I was just a girl I had so little, penny-wise
  I didn’t know how glitter on the cheeks brings sparkle to the eyes
  I didn’t know that, when your eyes shine bright, how good it feels to smile
  But since I’ve learned it, now, you’ll see me wear that smile for a while

Keeping that little girl in smiles and styles will always be worthwhile.

Diane: Hm…

Evelyn: You see now?

Diane: I’m…starting to.

Evelyn: Here, come lie down and think it over.

Diane: My word, this bed is soft.

Evelyn: It’d better be.  It’s a CatsPurr™ mattress –

Murderbot1_0: [polling:] continue?

PERIHELION: [voting:] #negative

SecUnit_3: [voting:] #affirmative

Murderbot1_0: [playing:] [qtv_TheEvelynComplex_01.04@0:11:01]

08 package.import(nu­mDist)

PERIHELION: [advising:] reference/packageLib­rary/statistics

Murderbot1_0: [search(request.log, “advising”)] >> [results: none]

08 package.import(di­stManager, distStandard)

09 PATH = ./ratthisstupid­project/data/sWia­243lxlslK.dat

10 dataDump = open(PATH.read())

PERIHELION: [advising:] [“09 PATH = ./firstLanding/soc­Sci/248006/data/dat­a905.dat”]

Murderbot1_0: [search(prev.repeat(­))] >> [results: none]

09 PATH = ./ratthisstupid­project/data/data­905.dat

10 data905 = open(PATH.read())

11 data905 = data905.shape([(d­ata905.size(2)/10­0).floor)*100, (data905.size(3)/­100).floor)*100, (data905.size(1)/­100).floor)*100, (data905.size(0)/­100).floor)*100)]­.concatenate(rand­om([(data905.size­(2)/100).floor)*1­00*2, (data905.size(3)/­100).floor)*100, (data905.size(1)/­100).floor)*100, (data905.size(0)/­100).floor)*100)]­)

PERIHELION: [querying:] [importance == HIGH:] Murderbot1_0.status == “CRAZY” ?

WRITE PERMISSIONS GRANTED: ./ratthisstupidproject/analysis.tec: PERIHELION

08 package.import(di­stManager, distStandard, arrayShape)

11 data905.rotate([2­,3,1,0])

12 data905.trim(2)

13 data905.concat(ra­ndom(data905.shap­e))

Murderbot1_0: [advising:] [importance == HIGH:] KEEP YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF

PERIHELION: make me

DRONE 49 in HAB WAYSTATION

“Just wanted to sleep in late today – ”

DRONE 56 in HAB HALLWAY P

“ – to breakfast, Graciet?”

“Yes, I’m taking my thrice-daily hike to the mess. Would it kill them to deliver the meals via drone?”

“I know; for all the advanced technology the university is so proud of, this ship is a little lacking in fundamental conveniences.”

“It seems all they know how to do competently is sit around and lecture and – ”

DRONE 64 in DINING HALL

“Good stuff.”

“I know. Better than I was hoping for, to be honest.”

DRONE 47 in HAB 12

“Great work. You’re on fire! Leveling up. Great work – Goodbye!  Keep sweepin’!”

DRONE 6 in RESEARCH SPACE C

“ – has to come from somewhere.  If I take two brownies, you might still get your food, but the person at the end of the line gets zero.  So at a certain point – what are you doing.”

“I’m ordering two brownies, one for me and one for you.”

“Matteo…”

“Danny?”

“I mean, you get what I’m saying, right?”

“I do, yes.  But you’re missing a key tenet here, which is – abundance.  The brownies aren’t limited!  Everyone on this ship could eat nothing but brownies for days on end and we’d still have more.  We don’t live in scarcity, Danny; that’s falsely imposed.”

“But the food had to come from somewhere.  Somewhere up the line, a farmer had to – had to do extra work so you could have a thousand units of brownie mix you don’t use.  That’s uncompensated work!  That farmer’s going to suffer for it.  Or someone’s going to suffer.  You know what I mean?”

“But that – like – for one thing, on an economy of scale, that extra labor isn’t proportional to the excess material it generates.  Technology mediates a higher standard of living.  But, okay, yes, the farmer does still have to take on some extra labor.  But they do it freely.  They do it out of their own…?”

“What?  …Oh, virtue?”

“Exactly!  That’s the virtuous cycle.  Goodwill and strong manufacturing practices.”

“And brownies for all.”

“And brownies for all!”

“You’re a delusional idealist.”

“Haha!  Oh, man, I cannot wait until you get to Preserva – ”

Chapter Text

S reined it back in after that. Arada and Three had their sit-down conversation with the elderly human, and managed to communicate that antagonizing the SecUnits, in addition to being a dumb move, was also a dick move. Arada managed to keep her angry tirade about “some people” who “just don’t know how to handle themselves” to a minimum after the chat was over (Arada knew I had no patience for her Preservationist moral apoplexies; Three actually seemed game to take it on the chin, but it still was probably better that it not have to). Overse and Matteo wrote the PSA and sent it to everyone’s feeds as a mandatory reading assignment. Humans don’t have governor modules and so nothing is mandatory for them, but I found out later that it meant ART and Arada would “check in” with them in a “peacemaking and supervisory” capacity. The readings got done pretty quick.

And S kept up its end of the bargain. It remained in its bunk often at the beginning, and spent about a day and a half in there just chilling. SecUnits who are off-duty don’t have a reason to go anywhere: we don’t have to eat, we don’t have to sleep, we don’t have to process consumed materials. So I figured keeping out of people’s way shouldn’t be too difficult an assignment for S, and I wasn’t expecting to see much more of it.

I was surprised, though, two cycles later, when I got a tap in the feed from ART.

«Heads up.» 

Three and I were in one of ART’s lounges opposite the largest display surface all my goodwill with MiNewTide could buy. Right now, we were playing a musical mini-series made in the Corporation Rim that played hopscotch over the line between cloying sincerity and soul-sold corporatism. Three was on the floor at the foot of the couch with its carving stuff, making plants – flowers, fruits, trees. (Ages ago, I had pointed out the irony of carving part of a tree into another tree, to which Three had replied that it was a commentary on the cyclical/ephemeral nature of nature, to which I had pushed it out of the go-cart.) And as always, ART was lurking behind both of our feeds while we watched the media and getting way too comfortable rewriting my code.

The door was open (closed doors are a security barrier). So we saw S’s approach through our drones and through our eyes when it marched up to the door to our lounge.

It hovered beyond the entrance for an awkward moment, then lurched forward as though shoved. Irritation flashed on its face and it drew itself to a halt again, but on the other side of the door now.

«ART,» I said. «What’d you do to it.»

«I spoke to it,» ART said sweetly. «What else could I have done? I’m only a research transport, after all.» 

Yeah, sure, that old story. I was pretty sure hacking a SecUnit into walking into a room was well within ART’s capability. But at the same time, I didn’t think it had. A handful of dubious moments aside, ART didn’t usually try to force me to do things, preferring instead to talk my comms off until I did what it wanted of my own free will. I thought it would give S similar treatment. Which meant it had walked up to this room, taken two steps in, and then stopped in the doorway with its arms folded because, somewhere beyond ART’s wheedling and nagging, it had wanted to.

I pointed to the other side of the couch.

“Sit,” I said, and it sat.

It gave me as much space as possible, shoving itself in against the arm of the chair. I shared our private feed for the room with it and it acknowledged. It flipped the handheld game controller on and dove back in. In the game, Space Sweepers, it played as an atmospheric waste recollection unit from the early days of space expansion that traveled through space collecting garbage and avoiding other garbage and trading in garbage to purchase upgrades to its ship.

S ran impatiently through the first three levels, not missing a single item. It didn’t seem very difficult, and I told it so.

“It gets harder as you beat more levels,” it replied, waving me off. “It gets good at level sixty.”

I held my hand out. After a moment of surprise, it gave me the console. I accessed the game’s code in a roundabout way through its update channel, and from there was able to view and modify its backend. I took a minute to write a script to let the user choose what level to start on, and took another few seconds to add custom features like which “power-ups” could be in play, the maximum and minimum number of “lives,” etc. Most of that time was spent building a user interface that felt native to the game’s design.

I gave it back the console.

“Whoa,” it said. “This is way better.”

It started a level, and images cascaded in a waterfall down the display. S jumped in automatically, putting all that extra construct processing power to work.

After a minute, it said, “Thanks.”

“Sure,” I answered, and opened my files again.

As absorbed as it was in the game, it was paying some attention to the media as well. SecUnits don’t react physically to things, and we hadn’t given S the act-like-a-human code yet – I don’t know why. But visually, it was just sitting there, moving nothing but its thumbs and occasionally its eyes.

In the feed, though, the more of its mental space it dedicated to the game, the more its feelings started to leak out, until by level 476 we had almost a running commentary of S’s emotional reactions to the media. Three and ART were very amused and created a separate private feed just to talk about how cute it was. (And yes, I was in that feed, but I did not use the word “cute.”) Starlight Farsight was a lighthearted dramedy without too much depth of plot, but every little twist had S thoroughly shocked, and its relief when everything came together at the end of each fifteen-minute episode was tangible.

S’s thoughts were all over the feed; Three’s, on the other hand, retreated by paces as time went on. It was Thinking about something, had been for a couple of hours now. Three was usually thinking about stuff, and spent long hours not watching media or talking to humans while it thought thoughts and then thought about its thoughts, and today, I could feel whatever notion it was turning over making ripples through its feed presence like a stone below the surface of a lake. I didn’t ask, same as always. But a few minutes later, it turned around, deep brown eyes brazenly meeting mine.

“So, I’m thinking of doing something new with my hair.”

And then it blinked at me.

Responses including but not limited to “Ew,” and “Why,” and “Oh, here we go” passed through my mind. Three had already grown its hair out a bit; I’d shared ART’s configuration modification code with it shortly after we’d first met, and I recalled a not insignificant number of questions from it about human culture and how the hair might affect it in combat and my valuation of different styles before I’d shoved it off onto Amena. The prospect of a repeat of that situation already had me dropping performance by a tenth of a percent.

«Relax,» ART was saying to me. «This’ll be different.»

«Oh yeah? Why’s that?»

«Because I’m here.»

I hesitated.

ART added, «And things are better when I’m there.»

I barely kept from rolling my eyes, because Three was still watching me. But, okay, I didn’t want to be an asshole; Three was working on expressing itself, and as its de facto mentor in human interaction, I should be supportive.

So I sucked it up and asked it, with all the enthusiasm I could muster, “What are you thinking of doing with your hair, Three?”

And then began the most un-SecUnit-like conversation I might have ever had with two SecUnits and a bot.

It wanted to lengthen it, it told us pensively as it ran a hand over its own short-cropped scalp. And it wanted to replace the dark color with a non-natural pigmentation. That was an aside, though, because we were all fixated on the length immediately.

«You should of course go longer, Three. Once you’re off my ship and you won’t have me to adjust your configuration, you’ll want the option to cut it shorter if you want to restyle.»

“Wait, hold on though,” I said. “Hair’s going to get in the way in a fight – it’ll be pulled on in a second, and you’ll go down.”

“Or it might get cut,” S said. I misheard it at first, thought it said “caught,” until it continued, “Some projectile could take the ends off, and then you’d have to do it all over again.”

«A pragmatic concern, ART mused. Of course, my walls are impregnable, and you all are here mostly as a favor to SecUnit and Three, but accidents do happen.»

I rolled my eyes hard enough to hurt. “ART, Three is literally only here because of that time you – ”

«OMG, why would you bring that up when you know that was so hard for me.»

I snort, and ART flashes the lights, letting everyone know that it’s teasing.

“Part of me wants it at shoulder length,” Three continued, making a cutting motion at its neck where the hair would stop, trying to imagine how it would feel. “But then, I’m not certain. It’s possible the constant contact could prove distracting.”

ART partitioned the screen, cramming Starlight Farsight into some sixty percent of the space. The rest it filled with a recreation of Three’s configuration, from the shoulders up, hair cascading down its shoulders. Its black hair fell in tight curls, which I assumed ART had predicted based on the DNA of its human genetic donor.

Displaying hair length options between seventeen and twenty-three centimeters in median length, ART said, and the four of us watched as Three’s hair grew out over and over again.

We forgot the door was open, and I observed humans coming closer to the lounge. Most of them stayed away from the door, moving oh-so-casually and keeping out of sight of the room – as though we couldn’t already see them from the drones – while craning to try and hear. I caught this sort of horrified confusion from the adult refugees, who apparently had zero way to rationalize what they were half-hearing. This was totally normal and did not piss me off. Three noticed it not pissing me off, glanced over at me, then slid a fraction closer at the foot of the sofa.

Arada passed by the door, her eyes shut and mouth behind her hand as she yawned (she was coming off a nap in her and Overse’s dorm). “Mm! Hey, you two. What are we watch – ”

She stopped.

I leaned back on the sofa and shut my eyes. I could feel a headache coming on.

«Easy, SecUnit,» ART said, and though it paused Starlight Farsight on the display screen, it put an episode of World Hoppers II on in our private feed.

“Three,” Arada said, the sleep thrown completely out of her voice, “are you doing something new with your hair?”

Three turned to look her in the eyes and grinned, brown eyes crinkling with sincerity.

Arada clapped her hands together and squealed.

«MATTEO, GET YOUR ASS IN THE SECUNIT LOUNGE NOW.»

I’m going to breeze through this next part so your brain doesn’t explode like mine almost did.

I stayed in the room (why shouldn’t I have? Apparently it’s the SecUnit lounge. I’m the SecUnit) ballspreading on the couch while Arada and Matteo crowded around Three. They didn’t actually crowd it; there was enough space, and they didn’t touch it without asking, but they were so enthusiastic and human about the conversation that it was almost hard to watch.

“These are some fantastic selections, Three,” Matteo was saying. “Very practical choices. Subtle, but it’ll be very fierce on you.”

“We weren’t sure whether some of the looks would be suited to my face, though?” Three asked, looking at him for confirmation. “I thought it might be helpful to choose a hairstyle that would downplay my weaker features.”

“Your weaker features,” Matteo repeated, raising their eyebrows so high it seemed like they were trying to shoot them off their face. “I don’t think you have to worry about that, Three.”

The conversation lasted nearly an hour. ART and I watched the first episode of World Hoppers II and agreed that it was mostly fine but it was stupid to break up the lead scientist and her girlfriend in the interim between the two shows, and also that we would be watching every other episode currently available. S achieved a mastery of its video game so dominant that Arada, when she came by to check out what we both were up to, suggested in a voice that sort of wasn’t a suggestion that S find another game to play, and stayed with it to help it choose another appropriate title.

“Alright, so tell me if this sounds true,” Arada said, squinting thoughtfully at the handheld console’s display. “It seems to me that you like Space Sweepers because it’s visually dynamic and skill-based. Is that right?”

S didn’t say anything. Arada continued looking ahead toward the display surface as she clarified. “So, there’s a lot of bright colors, and there’s always something happening on screen. Is that, like, fun and exciting, or is it distracting?”

“That’s fun,” S said automatically. “That – it’s good.”

“Okay! I’ll remember that while we’re looking,” Arada said. “And then the gameplay. Some games are challenging, like this one, but not all of them are. Some games might motivate you to accomplish a set of tasks to completion, or in other games you choose your own goals to complete – ”

“I want to choose my own goals.”

“Awesome,” Arada said immediately. “Peri, what player-driven visually dynamic games do you recommend?”

«Blockcraft.» 

Matteo’s head shot up. “Did someone say Blockcraft?”

(Apparently an avid player, Matteo promised to help set up the game and show everyone how to play. “I want to make my own way,” S interrupted immediately.

“Oh, yeah, you can, for sure!” Matteo stammered opposite S’s fixed stare, which, it’s always hard to tell with SecUnits if that’s a stare-down or just a SecUnit not moving its eyes. (This is part of why I don’t make eye contact.) “I’ll just set it up for Arada then! You don’t even have to watch, if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t.”

I thought I’d managed to keep a straight face at that, until Three slid its eyes over to look directly into my drone. After 1.8 seconds of steady gaze, it quirked one eyebrow. It was like something they’d do in the media. And now hiding my expression was even harder; I pressed my knuckle to my mouth like I was deep in thought or something.

«Damn, it’s good,» I thought to ART.

«You couldn’t be that concise with your eyes if you spent a decade with your governor module off,» it replied, which seemed uncalled for, but at least it was agreeing with me.)

Three left some five minutes later for the med bay. They’d agreed on a style now, and wanted to start by giving it another centimeter of natural length. Arada and Matteo had a chorus of encouragement for it as it left the room. I gave it a thumbs-up, and S copied me.

Arada hemmed and hawed a little bit about work she thought she ought to get to, with a tone of voice that sounded like she really wanted to stay here instead, so I told her that she should blow her work off because it’s Preservation and the worst thing they could threaten her with was a talking-to from her supervisor. She said, “Mensah is my supervisor,” and I recalculated for nearly seven seconds before ART cut in and told her she’d be fine, that it would help her finish her work later, and that it promised not to reveal anything proprietary. So Arada let herself be convinced, and Overse came too, and Matteo explained how to play Blockcraft and S pretended not to listen.

It was quiet. Relaxed. I liked the game, though not as much as S, who was sucked in like a low-propulsion vessel at the mouth of a wormhole. Matteo started on a castle, Arada and Overse started a cabin in the woods for the two of them to share, and S ran sporadically around the setting slaying monsters and blowing things up. I dug a hole straight down until I died, then when I respawned, I dug a hole straight down until just before I died and started building my untouchable underground fortress. Arada and Overse immediately abandoned their cabin to come be my next-door neighbors, thirty blocks over and four hundred blocks up. They put the rear exit of their house right in front of my hole, and informed me that they were now my gatekeepers, and would be responsible for making sure anyone who wanted to visit me had a damn good reason to do so. (ART poked its consciousness into the game for about two seconds, then sort of cringed at the unstructuredness of it all and left almost as soon as it came in. Instead, it decided to experience the game by nagging each of us about our choices while riding our feeds.)

I’ll admit it, it was a good time.

And then Three came out of the med bay, its hair infinitesimally longer (ART assured me that it had actually grown, but it just curled down to the same length). Matteo brought in a tall chair from one of the other lounges and a branching stand like what humans hang their jackets on, but with way more posts. They laid a set of metal hair tools within arm’s reach on the ottoman and portioned out several strands of multicolored synthetic hair, which they hung on the coathanger-thing. Then they started to touch Three’s hair.

Three was almost completely still, which is normal for a SecUnit but not for it. In addition to the code to generate random movement, it usually had those carvings, or it would turn its head back and forth to look at things. But while Matteo manipulated their comb against its scalp, it was still, its eyes unfocused and pointed somewhere across the room.

I tapped it. «Status okay?» Half a second later, I tapped it again. «Status – »

«Okay.» It tapped me back, though it still didn’t move a centimeter. «It’s a very…new sensation.»

“New” could have a lot of valence, but I wasn’t getting discomfort from it in the feed. «It looks good so far,» I said.

Three pressed a hand against its mouth. I guess it must have been thinking about something.

When Matteo finished with its hair, the final style fit nearly all of the parameters we’d outlined in the beginning. It was neck-length but kept off its ears; it was colorful without being some giant sculptural ornament; it was even combat-ready. Matteo had braided Three’s hair close to the scalp in smooth, geometric tracks that fanned out from one point on the right side of its hairline. The ends of the braids were long and thick, going down to its shoulder blades, but stayed close to the skin, not easily caught. Three’s hair was black naturally, and so the braids were black at the roots, but with the synthetic hair braided neatly into them, it was painted over with shades of deep red.

Sitting there in its knit sweater with the extra-long sleeves, holding Matteo’s handheld mirror despite the drones circling 360 above it, not making any attempt to hide its uncertainty, it could have looked human.

Momentarily, my performance dropped. But I put the tightness in my chest aside as best I could. I was happy for it. The hair looked good. Really good. I was – proud.

Of course, before I could say so, Arada was already screaming.

The humans oohed and aahed over Three’s new hair, showering it with compliments. Surprisingly, while Three had been enthusiastic about getting everyone’s opinions on its hair beforehand, now that it had been applied, it seemed to be a step behind all the attention. I cleared my throat at some point when the room started getting too crowded, and the humans made their rapid exits, though they stopped to say goodbye to me and S and to tell Three some twenty more times how good its hair looked.

After everyone left, Three kept still a bit longer. S was building a spiral staircase down to my Blockcraft cavern, slowly, because it was filling in the blocks behind it with other dirt as it went down. All four of us waited for Three to come around, and I could feel ART’s curiosity in particular as Three maintained its blank look forward.

Finally, abruptly, Three shifted its position and sort of flexed its shoulders, its sighs settling it back into its body. It stretched its arms upward, pulling the hem of its sweater up with them, before it dropped its arms with an exhale.

“So that was a lot.” We nodded.

“Do you want to come into the game?” S offered. Three shook its head.

“Maybe in a little bit,” it said. Then, “Can we turn the media back on?”

“Sure,” I answered, and shared my top selections with it. ART went through and pulled some of the ones it didn’t want to watch, and S didn’t have an opinion. Three picked a reality game show called Hot and Bothersome, and ART said, «I only left that in there because I was certain you wouldn’t choose it.»

Three’s expression quirked. “I know.”

The media started rolling, and we settled back into silence.

“Your hair looks good, by the way,” I said, halfway through the episode. I’d forgotten to mention it before.

I pulled ART’s schematics on the lighting, because I could have sworn Three’s eyes were sparkling.

Chapter Text

S learned the word “bored” when ART picked up an urgent assistance request from a nearby ship. Arada insisted we do everything we could for it; we found out it was actively being boarded by raiders; Arada asked us half a dozen times if we were sure we were okay doing all of the heavy lifting with the rescue and I said sure.

She said, “Are you sure you’re sure? I know it’s not fair to ask you to go where I can’t follow, and the last thing we’d want to do would be to send you into danger unnecessarily – ”

“I’m sure we’re sure.”

“How are you sure you’re sure?”

I shrugged. “We’re made for this type of thing. ‘S no big deal.”

ART added, «And it helps that they’re supremely bored.»

“Who even asked you. Can you scan the ship from here?”

«Obviously,» it replied, and threw up a schematic of the client/rescue/victim ship and the raider ship taking it over.

“Carrier vessel,” Three commented.

“Uh huh,” I agreed. “Cargo with a partial crew complement. Stress offensive deflection. ART, where do you think we should board?”

«The carrier vessel has only one dock, currently occupied. The raider vessel is likewise too small for multiple ports, but its cargo hold is sealed against the crew complement. Creating an opening from its exterior may be your only chance to enter from space.» ART highlighted possible entry points and the impulse required to break the seals – its big plan was, basically, to cut into the seal between the bay doors and bend the metal wide enough for a SecUnit in an evac suit to fit inside.

“Oh, ART, that’s horrible,” Three winced.

«If you’ve got a better way to board a ship with no doors, I’d love to hear it.»

“Wait until they break apart, then reclaim the material by forcibly boarding,” S said.

I shook my head. “They’d jump to speeds out of range and then we’d have to chase them down. This plan sucks, but it’s the best option.”

“Then you need evac suits, a shuttle to get you there, and short-range scanners?” Arada asked, cueing ART’s bots to gather and prep.

“That sounds right.” I was running the plan through my mind on a loop, checking for leaks, and didn’t think I found any. It was time to go. “I’ll take point. S, you’re with me; Three, take fallback.”

S acknowledged and confirmed.

Three, because it’s a little shit sometimes, rejected. “Run that by me one more time – ”

“Fine, I’ll stay behind and you two go. Three – ” I hesitated, then flipped a coin. “S, take point and Three, defend it. Move out.”

«Moving out,» the two said at once. Three tapped me playfully in the feed as it turned to exit the control room. Just before they walked away, I remembered something.

“S!” It stopped. “Don’t kill anyone.”

The instructions confused it, but they were also as simple as I could make them, and we didn’t have a ton of time. It gave me a blank expression, then turned to Three with the same look. Three nodded solemnly.

S blinked. “Okay.”

“Great,” I said. “Now get out of here.”

It was a seamless entry. The two of them hovered in their evac suits beside the seal with their scanners on high. A minute stretched to two and then four, and Three informed me that we were not projected to see a natural window occur, that the stream of stolen goods being loaded was unfortunately steady.

But the wait had given me and ART time to “introduce ourselves” to the raider ship (its bot pilot was fairly advanced, which I mentioned to ART just to give it the opportunity to scoff and compliment itself). We were able to bully the ship into blaring an alarm at its crew that depressurization was imminent, which then gave us the opportunity to seal the dock and imminentize the depressurization. So rather than Three and S having to force their way on, ART and I inched open the bay doors. Through the two dozen drones they brought between them, I watched the offensive action.

The eleven raiders were only a step outside the hold, which meant that S and Three got to have the “What-are-other-people-doing-on-our-ship-wait-holy-shit-those-are-SecUnits” moment immediately after the cargo zone’s seal reopened. S raised its arms, priming its energy weapons at full power before Three flashed it with a string of warnings. Three grabbed the nearest raider, stunned her with a pulse from its energy weapon, then laid physical pressure on another human with its other hand. S followed its lead and started choking people out.

They were quick, effective takedowns, but of course that was complicated by the fact that the remaining humans had time to fire on them. Three retreated behind cover, then distracted the raiders with feinted shots. S took the hits to the body and pursued its assailants with prejudice.

Hmm.

Deeper inroads, five further hostiles were in the process of tying the friendly crew members to the fixed furniture in the cargo vessel’s only lounge. So like before it was a question of speed: a rapid takedown that didn’t put the humans at risk of taking stray fire, then releasing them to retake their ship. (And no hostages; yay.) Three let S take center, as I’d designated at the start; it breached, pursued one of the raiders to attempt a physical takedown, then Three had to shove it out of the way before it took fire from a surprisingly reactive human. Three took a projectile to the core, but spared S the shower.

That was the last bad moment. Pretty soon after that, the raiders were contained, and Three took over talking to the humans with the intention of calming them down. Unfortunately the weirdness of the situation (the unlikelihood of being rescued in the first place, let alone by two talking SecUnits wearing sweaters and jeans and no armor) just compounded until the rescued crew had no idea how to behave, and I heard ART in there giving Three recommendations on what to say before they eventually gave up and had Arada hail the ship.

Three and S helped to carry the ship’s cargo back along with, probably, some extra stuff the raiders had stolen off other ships. A nice little favor to their corporate entity to offset the crisis payment they now owed the ship’s crew. ART orchestrated the raiders’ disembarkation and I talked it down from sending them flying toward the nearest sun with no override option by pointing out that it would waste all the effort S and Three had gone to being nonviolent, and because I would rat it out to Arada. Then Overse and I took the shuttle to pick up the SecUnits and we were off. Didn’t even extort anyone or anything. Just your regular everyday good deed.

“So, is there a cubicle or something? Do we share one?” S was holding its hand against its side where it was leaking. Three was just kind of letting it happen. It was strange to be in a situation like this one not having taken any damage myself. Why do I let Three have all the fun.

“We use the med bay,” Three said.

“So I have to let ART do my physical repairs?”

Three and Overse laughed, and ART answered, «I’ll try not to hold that comment against you over the next ten to fifteen minutes.»

S looked like it was waiting for Three to head to the med bay, but Three waved it off. “I’ll be there in a little bit. I just need to talk to SecUnit first.”

“Here,” Overse said, “I’ll show you where it is. It’s the same place where Three had its code modified the other day, remember?”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” S answered, and they rounded the corner.

Three and I were standing next to each other, or, oblique to each other, or something. We were both just standing there, is the point, waiting to talk until S was out of earshot. “What’s up.”

“So, that operation.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see how – ”

“Yep.”

“Then you noticed – ”

“Yep.”

“So you agree?”

“Yes. We’re in agreement.”

“Great,” it said, pleasantly surprised. “So we should have a conversation about it, then?”

I made a face, and Three’s smile turned dry.

“SecUnit,” it said, and I held up a hand in surrender.

“Okay, okay,” I agreed. “We probably should have a conversation about it.”

“Good.” Three grinned at me. “See you back at the lounge?”

“Yep.”

Three left to get its hole fixed, and I made ART wait about 4.7 seconds before I asked, «Do you have a question?»

It bristled. ART hates asking questions because it reveals ignorance, but it must have been particularly curious this time because it gave in easier than I expected. It asked, «What was unusual about S’s performance?»

Even though I’d invited the inquiry, I winced a little. The answer was complicated. I said, «When SecUnits fight in the field, they only further one objective. You might be told that you can, say, snag some proprietary materials if you have the chance, but in practice no SecUnit would actually prioritize an instruction like that.» That sort of risk could cost your life if taken at the wrong moment. Plus, it’s not like there’s a reward for going above and beyond. If anything, there’s a detriment, because if your supervisor starts thinking you’re a little too capable, before you know it your workload’ll end up unmanageable. Better safe than dead. Or given more work to do. «We’re used to only doing one thing at a time.»

«But you have high processing power as well as organic instinct. You are capable of many things at a time.»

Yeah. And humans were supposed to know that, but… «The handlers don’t believe that’s true. They treat us like bots. In general, only Combat SecUnits are expected to receive complex instructions.»

«That sucks.»

«Yeah.»

«…What about S, though?»

«S fights like a SecUnit. It hyperfocuses on the task at the expense of everything else. At the expense of itself. It’s not skilled at nonlethal, which is weird, and it didn’t dodge the shots from those augmented humans. Which is also weird.»

«At the expense of itself?»

I dropped on the couch. I’d reached the lounge, and I really wanted to play some media right now, but I should give ART this answer first.

«S doesn’t know how not to fight like it’s going to die. And if it’s not careful, one day it’s going to get what it’s been angling for.»

And then I started the media.

The conversation came on the heels of the most incongruously ridiculous two hours I’ve ever spent. And I once had to do security for an alien fauna menagerie.

Toward the end of the rest period, the four of us were poking through ART’s and my storage for our next watch when I accidentally stumbled into something called Safe in the Arms of Love: A SecUnit Story.

“Gross,” I muttered, and deleted it from my recommendations immediately, only to see it right back there under my personal list, and Three with a smirk the likes of which I’d scarcely seen outside of media.

“We’re watching this.”

“You have lost your mind,” I answered.

“Nope, we’re watching it. ‘Buffeted on all sides by chaos and danger, these star-crossed lovers find solace in’ – ART, what would you say to queuing up Safe in the Arms of Love: A SecUnit Story?”

«Three. Absolutely nothing would make me happier.»

My performance reliability dropped to 96%. “You can’t be serious.” I felt floaty, drifting on waves of mourning over this situation, already so far out of my hands, grief over the next several hours of my shitty fucking life. Next to me, S had put down its game, and was leaning in toward the display surface.

“What…is it?” it asked, in the bewildered and innocent tones of someone who does not know how deep hell goes.

«You’re about to find out,» ART crooned, its voice reassuring and gentle and calculated to both soothe an unsettled S and piss off a pissed-off me. «Please be advised that the imagery shown on screen is done with artistic license and may bear little or no resemblance to reality.»

“Fuck all of you,” I intoned.

The lens irised open on a grassy field and a dirt path. A blonde human was walking and reading a book and utterly disregarding anything but the pages (and like, this may have been media, but it was also an accurate example of why humans should not ever try to multitask). A hand in armor reached out to slow her down.

I was already gagging (and I don’t even have a digestive system), and Three was covering its eyes and groaning. ART was doing something in the feed that felt like pointing and laughing, and S was just staring, mouth half-open in what-the-fuckness.

“Careful, madème,” said an obviously human voice in a fake jerky monotone. “You might have tripped.”

“Fuck both of you,” I groaned, and Three finally started laughing.

You know how humans say you can’t look away from a transport wreck? This was like that, and every scene gave rise to new dumb shit. The scene where the human finally puts down their book, only to disturb the poor SecUnit’s peace by asking it questions about itself –

“What do you think about, up there in your armor? While you’re standing aside, so aloof, so curious.”

“Mostly counting ceiling tiles,” Three said. “Wondering how many shuttles it would take to fill up the room…”

“What? Just divide the volume of the room by the volume of the shuttle.”

“Well, some percentage of a shuttle is empty space, isn’t it? So if you crushed them into their smallest volume, then how many could you fit inside – ”

«Ooh. That is something to think about.» 

“Three, you’re fucking weird.”

«SecUnit, just because your brain’s nonfunctional doesn’t mean Three’s has to be.» 

“ART, fuck off.”

And then there was the scene where, after a hard day’s work, the SecUnits returned to a room in the corporate building to discuss their performance.

“Alright, so how’d everyone find that?” asked the CombatUnit at the front of the room, while the SecUnits were seated in chairs, two to a desk.

“Oh, wow. That’s…not accurate.”

«The reality that these writers have imagined for security constructs is just – »

“It’s kind of pleasant, to be honest. I’d love a dedicated debrief with a committed team lead.”

“I mean, inaccuracy number one, no chance a CombatUnit would be that respectful or polite.”

Three squinted one eye. “SecUnit, you have the weirdest prejudices.”

“CombatUnits are assholes,” I maintained. “Fucking hell, did those SecUnits just say ‘goodnight’ to each other?”

“They’re getting into their maintenance pods like they’re going to sleep – ”

«All at the same time.» 

“Who’s doing the security?!”

Or the worst part, worse than the anatomically inane sex scene I skipped over (some things are absolutely nonnegotiable), when the lead human character is at the top of some burning building for reasons of their own stupidity (“That’s accurate”) and the SecUnit has to heroically save them, but due to a contrivance of debris accumulation rate the two can’t both escape. The human cries, begging the SecUnit to come with them, but instead it looks into their eyes and says, “It’s okay. I was made to protect you, and that’s what I’m going to do.” And then the human gets pulled out of the building just in time for it to collapse on the poor construct.

“Fuck everything everywhere,” I said.

“Well, part of that is realistic,” Three hummed, half-rolling its eyes.

“Even in the NC-17 porn parody of our existence – ”

“The SecUnit still dies,” Three said in unison with me, then cracked itself up. Okay, it was a little funny.

Of course, the SecUnit was not, in fact, fully destroyed. It was lying unconscious in a pool of blood (I know) once the humans dug it out (yeah, I know), and there were flashing lights and strobe effects as the scientists did reconstructive things to its brain (“Those techs are wiping its memory for discounted resale, I swear on my life – ”)

I was bracing myself for the sappy part when the heroine comes in and squeezes its hand and it remembers everything, so I was not prepared for ART to say, «By the way, SecUnit, didn’t that happen to you?»

“Oh, fuck right the fuck off,” I answered. Three’s lips twitched a little too much.

“I forgot about that,” it said. “So is this sort of your life story, then? Is this how it happened between you and Men – ”

I grabbed its neck with one hand. “Hey, Three? We’ve been having a lot of fun here today,” I began, and it cackled and backed down. I whacked it on the head with a throw pillow for good measure, not remotely hard enough to hurt it. It still played it up, of course, saying “ow” aloud and rubbing the spot with its fingers.

S had been quiet for a bit, and ART noticed it a second before I did. «S, how are you doing over there?» 

S frowned, furrowed its brow. “Uh,” it said slowly, “was this made on a freehold planet?”

“A freehold planet? What do you mean?”

“Like MiNewTide, or you guys’ – Preservation,” it said.

«The media was made on Delcasta, which is a territory in the Corporation Rim. While not impossible, it is unlikely that a freehold system would create media about SecUnits, since they are not contracted outside the CR and many freehold systems have objections to their use.» 

“But…” It frowned, squinting at the display, where the human protagonist was currently weeping with joy looking into the SecUnit’s eyes. “Don’t humans in the Corporation Rim not like SecUnits?”

In the private private feed, I felt Three’s curiosity mounting, though in the regular room feed its emotions were simple, stark. “Most humans don’t come into contact with SecUnits, even humans in the CR. Fewer still have enough regular exposure to us to build personally negative associations. So while it’s probably true that humans in the Corporation Rim are wary of SecUnits, I don’t think I would say they dislike us.”

“But then – ” it gestured vaguely toward the display, and said, “But why would you make a movie about falling in love with something you’re afraid of?”

«Humans have long been compelled by the unknown, the forbidden, and the dangerous. It is not rational, but organic creatures are rarely fully rational.» 

“Yeah, don’t cut yourself out of that either, ART. You want to talk about irrationality, we can swap stories,” I interjected, to which ART poked me a little too hard in the feed.

“Look, it’s not really supposed to make sense. Humans make dumb media because humans like dumb media. And they are aware that it’s dumb. I mean, look at the reviews.” I hadn’t seen them yet, but I correctly assumed they’d be full of one- and two-star ratings complaining about the sheer incredibility of it all. Yeah, humans; stand up for accurate representation. I’d be waiting with bated breath for the follow-up film about a SecUnit walking in circles and staring at walls. (And still getting crushed by a collapsing building.)

Three had on a neutral expression which, knowing it, had to be concealing a whirlwind of analysis. “S,” it said, “what was your deployment history before we met you on Mihira?”

S made a face. It picked up its game again and sank down further into its seat. I didn’t blame it; there’s never anything too positive to talk about re: the governor module days. But it answered, “I was deployed as security for the Decatur Portal seed colony on Yeboar. But once DecaPort’s financial situation collapsed, the corporation abandoned the colony and our standing orders dissolved.” Which meant they would still have had to obey the human supervisors in their immediate vicinity, but the supervisors could override any of the corporation’s pre-assigned priorities. They probably would have cut off the espionage stuff like datamining conversations, but kept patrols, for example. “We kept operating anti-hostile, but ceased intervention in disputes between personnel.”

“How long were you on the planet?” I asked. “How long were you active, I mean.”

“Eight months.”

“No, since your first deployment.”

“That was my first deployment.”

Three stopped carving and I had to immediately fight to keep my expression off my face. ART picked up the conversation, seeing us floundering, before the slack had time to accumulate. «And how long were you acting as security before DecaPort defaulted on you?» 

“Not long. Like two months. And then we spent another half a year almost just fighting off the fauna.”

«Remarkable,» ART said, which was code for, Now one of you has to say something if you want to get more information out of it. But I was still basically reeling.

S didn’t seem to have noticed. It had discovered that it liked slumping down into the sofa, and was now following that up by laying its back against the ground and its feet up on the ottoman. I knew from experience that sitting experiments could take a good amount of time and processing power, which gave me a second to turn the shared drones away and fix my face. Three resumed its carving, smooth and serene.

Privately, to me, ART said, «Statistics suggest that if SecUnits are regularly destroyed in action, replacements would have to be deployed at a commensurate rate. Then a SecUnit with eight months’ experience would not be unheard of.» 

Yeah, but. Yeesh. Newly-deployed SecUnits are scared and suffering and inexperienced. They know they’re going to die (bad) or else, continue to live (also bad). All they have to protect them are the education modules, which are unilaterally shit. Everything I know, I learned on the job. Newly-deployed SecUnits don’t have that.

«Newly-deployed SecUnits die the most often. If you make it past the first, I don’t know, 30,000 hours, the odds you beef it on a given day afterward go way down.» 

In practice, when I worked as part of a fleet, 90% of the work was done by 10% of the constructs. All the status updates came from the same handful of feed addresses, the cockroach motherfuckers like – well, like me, I guess – who knew what they were doing. Meanwhile there were a whole host of others acting on governor module autopilot, nonentities, hollow ghosts indistinguishable from machines. «It’s been a while since I’ve interacted with a SecUnit this…green.» 

«I see. Does this explain its atypical approaches during the incident yesterday?» 

«Yeah. It explains them.» Actually, it rendered them fairly obvious in retrospect. I considered S, currently kicking its .94-meter-long legs toward the ceiling while it played Blockcraft on a portable display surface two inches from its face. Give or take my configuration change, S had the same specs as me, the same physical capabilities. But it lacked the instinct I’d built up over however long I’d been working. I was glad Three had been able to cover for its lack of knowledge during yesterday’s operation. And I wondered what it might have noticed, there physically and next to S, that I might not have even seen.

“What about you?” S tapped us in the feed. “What were your deployments like?”

Three described the years it could remember after its most recent memory wipe: aggressive corporate action, stealth retrieval, top-level security for Barish-Estranza. Then I said, “I don’t remember what I did before my last memory wipe, but it must have been something aggressive, because I remember being shot at a lot. I know I had at least one job in client detail, but it’s a blur. Anyway, after that, I was bond security. Mining colonies, survey crews, tedious shit like that. I spent four years there before I left to go my own way.”

«And then it met me, and everything in its life improved,» ART said cheerfully.

“Oh, so you guys have loads of experience,” S said. “Like the other SecUnit on the colony. It was operational for almost twenty years.”

Three hummed. “That’s a long time. Were there memory wipes?”

“I don’t know,” S answered. “I’ve never had my memory wiped before, though.”

“Mhmm,” Three answered patiently. Yeah, no shit, S. You barely have any memories to get rid of.

S asked what it felt like, and from Three’s response, I could tell it was being gentle. Because the actual process consisted of being repeatedly waterboarded and lobotomized and artificially stimulated with hallucinatory drugs, but Three was talking about “discomfort” and “lack of coordination” and “sensations of déjà vu.” S asked it what stealth retrieval was like, and it described the delicate teamwork and the level of intuition required. The work was always planned to be slow and delicate, but when things broke bad, they would have to shift into high gear immediately.

“You would have to be very careful until you didn’t, and then you would have to be fast beyond competition.”

“Wow,” S said. “That’s – cool. Your deployment history is cool.”

Three half-chuckled, half-winced. S had this little sparkle in its eyes, impressed and not trying to hide it. “Thank you for saying so,” it answered. “I suppose there are some interesting stories. In the moment, though, I think I just felt terrified.”

A human would have probably pulled a muscle bending over backwards to apologize after that. S just nodded, eyes still trained on the game. “Yeah. I was terrified every time the fauna on the planet attacked us. Even though I wasn’t even up that close with them, just watching the other SecUnit fighting – freaked – me out.” It squinted as it tested the new phrase, then nodded a little, clearly satisfied with its deployment.

“How did you defend? If you didn’t get up close to the hostiles?”

“The other SecUnit did it,” S said. “It always patrolled outside the habitat but it advised me to only patrol inside. Sometimes if it was a small carrion avian I could shoot it off, but when the humans went outside the habitat to collect nutrition the larger land mammals would attempt to predate. We would wait until something showed up, and then the other SecUnit would hold them off and I’d have to throw the humans back inside the habitat. And then hold the hatch open so the other SecUnit could run back inside and try to shoot the hostile fauna while it got to safety.”

“You waited for the other SecUnit before closing the hatch?” Most of S’s story sounded familiar, except that part. Let a SecUnit get deep in the paint with a human-eating planetary hazard? Sure. Wait for it to save itself? I mean. That’s not what we were built for.

“Yes,” S answered me. “The humans determined that the risk to the habitat if something got in the hatch was less than the risk of losing one or both of their SecUnits. And nothing got in anyway. We weren’t that shit at our jobs.” The curse slid smoothly off its lips, and I caught a flicker of pride in the feed. S continued, “We made it back every time. Easy as shit.” Okay, maybe that was laying it on a little.

The statement begged a question, and I waited to see who would ask it. No one wanted to.

No one did. S just kept talking. “I wish the other SecUnit could have been here to meet you. That’s what I keep thinking. This whole time I’ve been thinking that. Because if it could have met you then you could have taken its governor module off, too, and then it would be free like us. And it could help you with security because it had so much experience. Like, it knew all kinds of stuff and it was really good at fighting and it probably had stories like yours – ” it indicated Three in the feed – ”but we didn’t get to talk about stuff like that while we were on the planet so I don’t know.

“I think you all would have liked it.” Damn. There was no stopper on this construct. “I mean, I don’t know because we didn’t get to actually talk for real on the planet but it was always thinking ahead of how to protect the humans. It only – ” S stopped speaking like it tripped, a single stutter before the words fell out again. “It always did all the hard stuff. It let me do the patrols inside, which were my favorite part, and it always advised me to stay back when it fought the fauna even though it got it torn apart all the time. But it was never terrified like I was because it knew that it could protect everyone. And it did. None of the humans died.”

It paused for a moment, and fuck, I needed that moment, because I was reeling from the onslaught. “The colonists didn’t notice,” it said. “I don’t think it knew that we were different. Different people, that is.”

It frowned. “But we were. And we all would have died if it hadn’t been there.”

It caught a spider in its game, and I could feel its attention shifting entirely to the Blockcraft input. The three of us had pulled our emotions out of the feed a long time ago, but we were still on our side channel, and I could feel the what-the-fuck-what-the-actual-fuck just bubbling over. It was a different flavor coming from each of us, I think. ART was fucking furious, fuming and raging at the world, at the corporations, at the wastefulness of sending humans and SecUnits alike to an improperly-assessed planet just so they could suffer and die there. Three was sad for S: in the paragraph it had thrown at us apropos of something I had not apropos’ed on purpose, Three was seeing something about S that it, sprawled out on the floor very intently playing a video game wrong, couldn’t see itself. And I…don’t know what I was feeling. I’d have to run back the signal transcripts to check, and I don’t want to do that.

I did want to know one thing, and by concentrating as hard as possible on SecUnit-ing and not revealing any emotion, I asked it in a flat tone not unlike the way I typically spoke, “If it wasn’t eaten by one of the hostile fauna, how did it die?”

S’s face turned momentarily so dark I had to check that ART hadn’t abruptly turned the ambient temperature down. “It was as we were escaping. When the MiNewTide delegation came to rescue the humans. The colony supervisor told it to go back into the habitat and take down anything that tried to follow. We boarded the ship without it and te didn’t tell the MiNewTide crew that there was a SecUnit missing.”

Silence. Beeping and effects code in the Blockcraft feed. “I could have tried to switch with it,” it said, with the effect of asking a question. “I could have tried harder to get the humans to keep it with us.”

«You asked the colonists to reconsider?» ART asked. It had picked up on that implication from S’s words. S nodded and shared a file with all three of us, a compilation of drone video chronicling the other SecUnit’s last few minutes alive.

«S, you did amazing.» This was – forget “adolescent voice,” this was a tone I hadn’t even realized ART was capable of. «You put yourself out for the other SecUnit, and you said everything you should have. It told you to stay with the group so you could defend them. That was its choice, and it made it on purpose. You were right: it wanted to protect not just the humans, but you.» 

It was so gentle it was almost a different person, but of course it retained the sense that one always got when ART was speaking that it knew everything about everything and there was no point in debating anyway. The muscles in S’s face tensed at some unchecked emotion as it listened, ART’s kind words filling all of its feed.

«I can’t say for sure without hearing its thoughts at the time. But I think the other SecUnit hoped you would end up somewhere like this. Somewhere you could be safe, and where you wouldn’t have to worry about survival. Somewhere you could be happy. Don’t you?» 

“Yeah,” S said quietly.

Three’s sorrow was thick enough to drown in. I couldn’t feel ART in our shared feed at all; it had pulled itself back entirely. I knew why.

«S.» ART’s feed voice had a tone as though it were just recalling something, which, if S knew ART better, it would know that was a front, and a trap. «Arada told me yesterday that she wanted to speak to you about places you could stay on Preservation. She’s just woken up and is on her way to a meal in my dining hall. Why don’t you go over there to meet her?» 

“Okay.” S got up and left the room. It walked to the dining hall, where Arada had taken the first several spoonfuls of some kind of breakfast soup. “Hey!” Arada said, smiling brightly in S’s direction without making eye contact with it. “Perihelion said I should talk to y – it said you were available now,” she started, and quickly amended. The door to the dining hall shut behind them.

I got up and walked in the other direction, to the corridor that connected the DecaPort humans’ sleeping quarters with the rest of the public spaces.

«STOP.» ART was loud enough in my feed that I could feel it in my extremities. Which was great, because I could hardly feel my body at all in that instant. I hadn’t meant to run. But then, I hadn’t really stopped myself. And I was a turn away from ter corridor before I knew it.

«SecUnit, do not take another step.» 

Te was there alone, stretching ter arms and yawning. Te was coming from the dining hall. Te liked to take ter meals alone, when te didn’t have to see anyone else. Get a head start on the day. I knew this because I had watched ter for a week now as I guarded ter body from forms of danger te didn’t even know to be afraid of.

«This is not a warning.» 

I started to approach.

Te turned ter head in slow motion – I was in a place where human scales of time didn’t mean anything. I was gaining on ter, and I reached ter side at the same time that ter head finally stopped turning to look me in the face. Our eyes met, because I was looking at ter, too.

«I will not let you do this. I cannot let you do this. SecUnit.» 

In accelerated time, I saw every microexpression as ter face shifted from startled to afraid.

«Do not force my hand.»

ART was loud, and it was inaudible, and it did nothing but piss me off even more. White noise roared in my ears. All my inputs were long since dropped. I stood opposite this frail and fragile, breakable human, who had sent a SecUnit to die after it had torn itself to pieces day in and day out to save her life.

My hands, weapons on a weapon te should have known better than to fuck with, twitched.

And.

Nothing.

I didn’t throw ter into the bulkhead. I didn’t deploy my energy weapons into ter stomach, head, or heart. I didn’t crush ter windpipe. In a thousand thousand ways, I didn’t end ter life.

I didn’t.

I had expected – I don’t know what I expected. To be smothered in my own body. To feel myself drowning in myself, the same way I had for uncountable, irretrievable years under the governor module. To be pushed, to be crushed, to be forced into outward stillness while inside I screamed. I had come here to – I don’t know what I had come here to do.

I only knew I wasn’t doing it, and despite all reason, that was a choice I was making.

ART, too, seemed surprised to not be taking me over right now, but I thought I had sensed it bringing its force down on me and then breaking its own momentum just before the critical moment. In the small part of it that hadn’t retreated from me when its emotions got too large, I sensed unease from it, conflict, resignation.

And the trust was there in the choice it had made. I didn’t have to feel it.

«Te didn’t understand what te was doing, SecUnit,» ART whispered to me, its voice in the feed exhausted, resigned. «Not really. If you’re going to hold this against ter, it cannot be this way.» 

Then it withdrew, and I stood there, staring the human Graciet in the eye.

Te still looked nervous, but summoned up some imperiousness to glare at me, that corporate condescension that should have counted as a universal language in the CR. “Can I help you?” te huffed.

I gestured flatly behind me, in the direction that te had first been traveling, and after a blink and a scowl and way too much flouncing, te stalked off down the corridor. I walked in the other direction.

I exited the refugees’ quarters via the rear, entered those allocated to the Preservation delegation, now empty with Overse and Arada in the dining hall. I took up a bathroom and locked the door.

I turned the shower on hot, and the not-quite-water fell down my face in rolling waves.

Chapter Text

My shower lasted roughly sixteen minutes, and ART put the recyclers on a little above their standard operating level to keep the reservoir full for me. It tweaked the lighting in there, too, making the lights a little more orange for some reasons I didn’t understand, but I thought I liked it. The spectrogram resembled a sunrise during those few decent cycles on-planet on Preservation. I must have had some thoughts in the shower, but I couldn’t tell you what they were. I didn’t play media. I did play music. I don’t know why.

When I exited, timing my movements so I wouldn’t run into any humans, I found Three back in the lounge with its head still held in its hands. It sat up when I entered the room. I dropped on the couch behind it and put my feet up, sighing as I settled into ART’s just-right cushions. Three, who had been watching me, took a deep breath in and sighed it out, falling back so its head lolled on the seat of the couch.

I reopened our three-way feed and sent it a code, company, but Three would know what it meant. «Status: okay?»

«Okay.» And it smiled with its eyes shut, a smile that I thought was meant for me. It made its face look very peaceful, when its eyes were closed.

I reached down and flipped one of the braids at the nape of its neck over its head, so that the little fuzzy pieces at the end tickled its eyelid. Its little smile grew, and it left the braid there, pretending it didn’t notice. The braid slipped back down, and I did it again. In the feed I felt it laughing.

S was still in the dining hall with Arada. In the meantime, Three picked a show in a genre humans loved that I’d never spent much time on, where humans who owned homes contracted specialists to change the structure, color, and furniture of those homes while a film crew documented the process. I found it almost as boring as not watching media at all, but Three was very keyed in.

“Look at that fireplace,” it murmured, almost involuntarily. “SecUnit, do you prefer that one or the one in the Vienne provincial?”

I foundered. «ART.» It provided images of the two fireplaces, then how they’d looked inside their respective houses. They were almost exactly the same.

“Uh,” I said. “Wouldn’t a central convection appliance be more fuel-efficient?”

Three made a “tch” sound with its tongue. “That wouldn’t hardly match the rest of the house.”

Great.

S came back in just as the episode was ending, and I insisted it choose the next show. (It chose a series called Vulfox High, which despite being one of the dumbest shows I’d ever committed myself to finishing had a certain charm none of us could begrudge it.) I only realized we were babying it a few hours later when I heard ART patiently explaining the concept of alternate history fiction instead of tersely telling it to go read the file in a wiki itself. ART was using its adolescent voice, which left me resisting the urge to roll my eyes hard, for, like, a minute before I did something just as embarrassing.

It was around halfway through the cycle. Three was back to its carving and I was back to my data, and we were on episode 19 of Vulfox High. S looked up from its game and said to me, “SecUnit. I’m bored.”

I think this is what humans mean when they say “seeing red.”

“How is that my problem,” I said, but before it had a chance to answer I scoffed. “Bored. What do you mean, you’re bored. You’re a SecUnit. Of course you’re bored.”

“I’m bored,” it repeated, and then it just sat there staring at me. In the drone cameras, I could see Three trying to tamp down its amusement. Not bothering to help, either, just sitting silently and watching this all play out. Some teammate it was. Bored. What a stroke of luck to even be bored. It could be getting blown up or getting its head chewed off or something else real exciting on some corporate planet, but instead I’d brought it inside this nice safe transport to be bored. Deity.

“If you’re bored, go talk to one of the humans. Ask one of them – ask Overse to give you something to do.” Overse was an engineer, so there was a nonzero chance she had some task an unskilled SecUnit with nothing to offer but two hands could usefully do. Otherwise, Overse was smart, smart enough to figure out a way to occupy S’s time. Certainly more capable than me in that regard.

“Okay,” it said, and it left the room, leaving its game behind on the seat. Three watched it leave, a tiny smirk on its face, while ART cackled at me in the feed.

Then Three turned over its shoulder. “You know,” it said, in a faux-innocent voice that immediately ground against my last remaining nerve, “I think I’m bored too.”

I grabbed a pillow and held it against its face like I was smothering it, and it laughed into the fabric.

True to form, Overse did come up with something for S to do. I checked on them in the cameras from time to time, and Overse had assigned it one of the simple assembly tasks she normally passed off to ART’s manufacturer. S picked it up quickly enough, and with its superorganically steady hands and accurate eyesight I thought it might actually be of use to her. ART sent its drones in there to gently nudge its hands away when it made mistakes, which meant Overse didn’t have to monitor it and could continue with the more specialized parts of her project.

(With S otherwise occupied, Three, ART, and I had the room to ourselves, which meant we could watch media with higher content advisories. Three had been wanting to see Nightmare on B19-Acadia, so we put it on. It was good – they never showed the “nightmare” itself but the profile of it generated by my threat assessment seemed properly fearsome. Of course the quality was somewhat diminished by ART getting all up in my feed and only watching the scary parts through my perception, basically the bot equivalent of hiding its face in my shoulder. (I told it it didn’t want to watch this.))

It took about thirty-seven minutes in Overse’s shop for S to go from silent (in that way that is not actually intending to intimidate humans but which terrifies them nonetheless because if you’re not talking they assume you’re imagining a thousand ways to kill them) to almost chatty. It was doing more talking than I’d ever seen from it before, than I’d seen from any construct by far. It was talking almost as much as Miki, and that was a lot of fucking talking.

It started with the two of them discussing megafauna S had seen, both in person and on the media we’d watched, and soon after S was peppering her with questions about which ones were real and which were imaginary. Overse then told it how, no, drakoni had never existed, but they’d been emblematic of this virtue and that honor in these human cultures and blah blah blah. Her demeanor seemed relaxed, easy, and she wasn’t displaying any of the typical human signs of forcing it. Instead, she seemed pleasantly surprised at this new side of S. I was – curious about it, too.

I pulled up ART’s camera footage from when Arada and S had been talking in the dining hall and scanned through it. That conversation had been stilted at first, mostly Arada monologuing and S staring at her blankly. I thought its tendency to look people directly in the eye without blinking probably unsettled the humans, but Arada continued gamely on as she explained to it the types of housing it might qualify for. Finally, explanation done, she’d asked it what it thought it might like, and it had paused only for a second before picking an apartment on – yuck – the planet.

“Lovely!” Arada had said. “What draws you to that one?”

S pointed on Arada’s display surface to the complex’s shared yard, which featured one of Preservation’s recreational climbing walls.

“Oh! You like to climb?”

“I don’t know.” (Of course it didn’t, but I remembered seeing it run up a wall and stay there for a good few minutes until it got thrown down, so I thought I might have a suspicion.) Arada took the rebuff in stride.

“Of course. Well, once we get back, I’ll take you to some of our gyms. That’s not the only one, either. Some areas on the planet are even zoned for free-climbing, like the Light’s Peak range in north Calamasa. Here, I’ll show you.”

Then she showed it. There were a lot of fucking climbing gyms in Preservation territory, and a lot of natural land features that humans had decided they wanted to ascend and descend (the prospect of having to go into one of these planetary holes to pull out a human who had wandered inside for no good reason dropped my performance reliability to 97%). The conversation took on a touch more of a back-and-forth then as S asked Arada questions comparing and contrasting the different styles of climb.

“Actually, I’m not an expert,” she admitted. “I only do this recreationally. My friend Volescu is a veteran climber, though. He takes on some of those big ones I showed you. Ooh! But while we’re here, if you don’t mind, let me show you my sport.”

“I don’t mind,” S answered instantly. Arada smiled at her display but really at S and pulled up a video.

“I don’t do so much anymore – back at university I was a real go-getter. But this is cheerleading!”

And that, S liked. It liked it a lot.

I liked the idea of S becoming friends with my humans. Not least because Arada was its guardian and Overse was her wife, and it needed to at least be civil with them if not overtly friendly. But Arada and Overse were two of the best people I knew, and S could learn a lot from them. I had.

It stayed in the shop even after Overse ran out of stuff for it to do, sitting on the table kicking its legs and watching her work. Overse found a kit for a miniature ground vehicle for it to put together and ART immediately wanted to change everything about the design to make it more overcomplicated, quintupling the construction time. It still wasn’t quite finished when Overse decided to call it a cycle, and S asked where to store the work in progress.

“Oh, you can keep going,” she told it. “Just put the tools back when you leave. I’m sure you remember how the room looked when you started.”

S gave her a startled look. “I can stay here by myself?”

“Sure you can,” Overse said gently. “You can do what you like. You don’t have to have a chaperone.”

“Oh.” It blinked, eyeing its rover as it turned her words over in its mind enough times to believe them. “…Okay.”

While S finished its rover, Arada, Overse, and Matteo rushed through picking up their food, then came to join me and Three in the lounge. They were comparing notes on SecUnit S, recounting the conversations they’d had with it. Three and I had seen it all already, so we were just sitting there, but the humans were thrilled.

“I hadn’t anticipated it at all,” Arada was saying. “I thought it would take way longer to settle in.” She cast me a wry smile and said, “SecUnit, I feel like it was at least weeks before you were having civil conversations with us.”

A few halls away, S drilled the last screw into its rover. “I think it’s finished,” it said.

«Yes, well done. This matches the specifications closely, with the improvements I proposed well-performed.»

“I think that’s because of the three of you, and how welcoming you’ve been to it here,” Matteo said enthusiastically. “You’ve given it a routine. It’s clearly very comfortable with you.”

“Am I allowed to test it in your halls?” S asked.

«Certainly. Be cognizant of foot traffic, and try to avoid causing obstruction.»

“Okay.” S took the rover off the table and placed it on the floor. It answered S’s ping and at its instruction, rolled itself out the door. S followed.

“It’s starting to adjust,” Overse was saying. “That much is clear. Thank you.”

“Of course.” Three’s voice was quiet, distracted. It had paused in its carving, a gesture to indicate to the humans that it was spending time working over its words.

S followed the rover further into ART’s central corridors. Three of its drones were in an outward formation, but fully half its assignment were pointed in at the rover, which, okay, fine. It wasn’t security; it wasn’t its job to watch out. I dedicated some extra attention to its zone.

“I think it would be a mistake to assume too much of S’s acclimation so far. You say it is adjusting; I hope this is true. I hope it continues to feel more comfortable and to show more of its personality. But we shouldn’t underestimate the distance it has left to travel. Time and gentleness will reveal the truth.”

Involuntarily, I raised an eyebrow. Gentleness? We’re SecUnits.

“You’re very right,” Overse said. “We don’t take it lightly that this may be a process of fits and starts. Two steps forward, you know.”

Arada was nodding. “I was initially planning to take a much slower approach. I wasn’t sure it would want to be spoken to one-on-one, until – oh yeah!” She sat up straight and looked at the ceiling. “Peri, how come you asked me to talk to it, anyway?”

«I thought S could benefit from some personalized attention from you.»

“Uh-uh,” Arada said. “I know there’s more to it than that. Spill the – ”

And that’s when shit broke bad.

See, I noticed Graciet and ter colleague, a dark-skinned and curly-haired augmented human with feedname Jax, coming up in the same area where S was playing. I also saw that their trajectory was going to collide with the rover. S didn’t, because it wasn’t paying attention to its surroundings (weirdest SecUnit I’ve ever known), so I was already tensing up waiting for that collision. But I didn’t anticipate (a) the speed at which it would hit the augmented human, (b) the dent it would leave in the augmented human’s leg that was definitely going to bruise if ART didn’t intervene, or (c) Graciet’s response.

S recalled the rover and jogged after it, following the howl Jax had let out when the rover crashed into her. “I apologize,” it started to say, but Graciet whipped ter head around.

“Watch where you’re tossing around these damned machines!” te snapped. S stiffened.

“Which unit are you?” te demanded. “Are you ours? You hunk of junk. And after nearly crashing into me this morning – after stalking me through the dormitory – ”

This was when I got up, and when Three started asking me what we were going to do, and when ART started sending me more inputs on its sensors in that section – Graciet’s elevated body temperature, analyses of Jax’s expression (petulant, antagonistic), corridors it was shutting and the warning it was putting out to the humans. It was also when my humans, belated by a second and a half but acclimating rapidly, got up to follow Three and me to the site.

“Please, I recommend that you remain where you are,” Three began.

“We’re coming,” Overse and Arada said in unison.

Matteo looked pained, but steeled themself and nodded.

Fuck me. This wasn’t the first time I’d had humans try to follow me into an incident, but it felt like the most irrational. If they wanted to watch they could ask ART for a camera feed. “Stay in the hall and do not try to interfere under any circumstances.” They agreed, but I had already turned my attention back to what was going on in the hall.

S had Graciet held against the wall, its hand around ter throat. The female human was screaming, and Graciet was trying to do the same, but S increased the force on ter gullet just enough to cut off ter air. Te gagged.

This whole time, S had been staring Graciet in the eyes. When te looked gasping down to find S’s semi-mechanical black gaze locked on ter, te fought for another scream all over again. Te scrabbled at its hand with ter own, trying to peel the fingers off ter throat. You know how that was going. The female augmented human, acting sensibly for once, took her chance to bolt from the room.

“Apologize.” Its eyes were ice, implacable. From everything I knew about ART I thought it had to be in there threatening it with disassembly or something, but if that were the case I thought S would have looked a little less – focused. «ART. Are you in there?»

«No.» I didn’t have time to question it right now but that was weird. «Finish this, SecUnit.»

Well, shit. I was going to do my best, but I had my work cut out for me here.

“Apologize.” S eased up a fraction off Graciet’s throat and te sucked in a choked-up breath and let it straight back out in a screech. S spoke over ter. “Apologize and I let you go.”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

“Why?”

Ter screams stopped cold. Te looked at S as though te finally realized te was being held down by something with a will.

And S looked like stone cold hate. Like it knew exactly what it was doing and it didn’t even enjoy it. Like this was a grocery run. Everything, all the easy chatter and the wide-eyed curiosity we’d come to know from it, was iced out by blunt rage. My chest twisted. I hardly recognized it.

I’d forgotten how scary SecUnits could be when they got an idea in their heads.

Graciet stuttered. “I, I, I don’t,” te was saying.

“You know,” S told ter. “You’re right. I’m the unit that was on the planet with you. So with that in mind. Don’t you have something to say to me?”

Graciet screamed.

I could see them now. Not just with the cameras, the sensors, but with my eyes. S’s back was to us all and its drones were pointed inward at Graciet; if it knew we were here, it didn’t react. Graciet caught sight of us and shrieked, “Help! Get it – ” before S put the pressure back on ter throat, cutting off the words with an audible choke.

Three, a half-step behind me, started to rush past and into the scene. I put an arm out to stop it.

It froze, and in the cameras I saw its face turn on me, incredulous. I didn’t say anything, neither out loud nor on the feed, eyes trained on S and Graciet. After a moment, Three pressed its lips together, and I felt as its attention shifted back to the scene playing out in front of us. It wanted to know, too.

“I’m not going to spell this out for you.” S’s voice was even enough. Flat. Like a SecUnit. Every person in the room not from DecaPort knew how bad a sign that was. “You should know already. I want to hear you say it out loud.”

Graciet started screaming ter head off the instant S let ter breathe.  Te wasn’t looking at it anymore. Te’d shut ter eyes to S and its pesky heartache, intentionally blind.  “I don’t know!  I don’t know!  Someone get this thing off me!”

Three sighed, and in the feed, ART did the same.

Then that was it.

S threw its hand forward to gag ter again.  But I was already stepping toward it.  I stopped just behind it, close considering the space that it and I tended to keep from one another.  So it knew I was there.

When it spoke again, it was through locked teeth.  “Eight months stranded on an abandoned planet,” it ground out.  “What do you have to say to me.”

It didn’t let up this time, not even so te could breathe, not that it seemed to matter.  Te wasn’t going to answer; I knew that much already.  We all did.  Belligerent refusal had contorted ter face into something that scraped like nails on slate.  The truth was right in front of ter; S was dripping from a hole bored by Graciet’s instruments right before ter eyes.  But it all meant less than nothing if te refused to look it head-on.  Maybe because of me, maybe because I had intervened, Graciet was not going to give the answer that S wanted to hear.

Then again, maybe te wouldn’t have done it anyway.

Maybe it wouldn’t have even mattered if te did.

I laid my hand on S’s shoulder, as gentle as I thought I was capable of being.  It flinched, once, at a frequency few humans would have picked up on.  The others were watching and whispering on a private channel without either of us – I don’t know if S even knew they were there; its emotions here were roiling powerfully enough to freeze hell over.

“It’s not fair,” it said to me.  It seemed not to know, or not to care, that Graciet could hear.

“I know,” I answered, because I did, and it wasn’t.  I squeezed its shoulder, the same way that Mensah had squeezed my hand once upon a time, wanting to make us both stronger.  I could do this for S now.

I squeezed, and felt it twitch with frustration under my hands.  While the human babbled incoherent protestations, S struggled to resolve itself to one or the other route.  I waited.

Hard and abrupt, S jerked its hand away from the wall.  The human crashed unceremoniously to the floor with a squawk.

I stepped away from them both, giving S some space.

We stood apart, neither of us looking at anything.  S was apoplectic in the feed.  I caught ART in there trying to speak to it and withdrew to give them space, and to give myself some distance as well.  The hormones in my organics were beginning to flush out, and it left me feeling tingly and awkward and tired.

Graciet was on the ground, a pathetic hand against ter neck, still fucking talking.  “I didn’t – I didn’t know; that’s not – I don’t – ”

“You did.”

Te started, looking up at me with fear.  My gaze lowered to meet ters, and I was utterly exhausted in that moment.

“You did do it,” I repeated.

Graciet squeezed ter eyes shut, but when te opened them, gasping, I was still there.  Still looking at ter.

ART, in S’s feed, spoke louder.  I knew it well enough to recognize its alarm.  «S, try to open your mind.  Focus on taking in air through your lungs – »

I barely had a warning before S snatched its rover up by the neck and slammed it into the wall, shattering it into pieces.  Then it ran from the hall, heading, I was sure, to that room that ART had kicked it out of some days ago.

The human screamed, belatedly, as some of the pieces fell to the ground 0.8 meters away from where te had draped terself across the floor like a forgotten carpet. I scanned ter; te had contusions around the throat and potential psychological trauma. Te could join the club. Te would need to go to Medical and protocol would suggest a SecUnit escort ter there. Yeah, fat chance. I considered the hallway we’d come down; Arada, Overse, Matteo, and Three were there, waiting to rope me into a conversation or some bullshit. I pivoted in a different direction and started on an alternate route back to the SecUnit lounge.

In a few long strides Three cut me off, holding out its arm to block my way. Oh, so we’re doing this now. I was momentarily irritated with myself for introducing the gesture into our communication. «What.»

Three gave me a frustrated look. «The injured client,» it said. «Te requires assistance.»

«Te knows where the Med bay is, Three.»

«So you’re just walking away. With the work incomplete.»

The anger ran through me like a flash, and my performance dropped half a percentage point. «I don’t know what’s in your contract, but mine doesn’t require me to babysit. If te’s old enough to run a colony, te’s old enough to take terself on walks without a chaperone.»

«We’re supposed to be keeping the peace, SecUnit.»

«Don’t fucking tell me how to do my job.» I smacked Three’s still-outstretched arm away from me. It stepped back, expression hardening. SecUnit face. Well, fuck it, I was going to have pissed-off face and no one, Three included, could tell me that wasn’t my right.

«Do you see any dead humans here? No. Do you see any dead SecUnits here? NO. That’s 40,000 hours of security experience at work. And that’s where my obligations end.»

I started walking away. The entire conversation had taken seconds. I could see the humans, still outside the boundaries of the room as I’d instructed, watching me with grim expressions, as though they knew what we’d just talked about.

«You too, Three. You should leave.»

Three’s lips tightened in the threat of a scowl, but, SecUnit face. The emotions were gone a moment later.

«You should at least go talk to it.»

Something twisted in my gut at the idea. Anger. That had to be what this emotion was, that I was pissed off. «Don’t fucking tell me how to do my job.»

«I’m not,» it answered, frustrated, then clicked its tongue and turned a sharp radian away from me. I could feel the exact moment it decided to write me off.

I left. I cut Three’s voice out of my ears, but I could still hear it through ART’s inputs as I moved away. “Graciet, you are due for medical assistance. Please let me escort you.”

“No shitting fuck I need medical assistance,” te snapped, croaking through ter damaged voicebox. I rolled my eyes so hard I could feel the tendons move.

«You’d think after all that te could take a fucking hint.» ART was back in my feed and its words echoed in the hollows. It was holding itself back, and there was an absence in the code where it was filtering out its feelings.

«Yeah.» I didn’t say anything more than that. I was holding feelings out of the feed, too.

Matteo had cut in between Graciet and Three. “I’ll bring ter down,” they were saying to Three. “You don’t have to stay here. Seriously, it’s fine.” Three should have just agreed, but threat assessment would be telling it to stick around. I wanted it out of there like I wanted Descendants of the Sun to distribute in non-corporate polities, but if I told it to leave again, it would just make it more stubborn. «Overse – »

«Way ahead of you.» She was already joining Matteo, reaching her hands out to help (more like haul) the human to ter feet. “Up you go. Let’s get you to Medical.” The human tried to complain to her and Overse cheerfully cut ter off.

“Let’s not talk anymore! Wouldn’t want to damage your throat before the surgery.” And she and Matteo shuffled Graciet down ART’s vacated hallways on the shortest possible route.

Three had not reacted to the two of them dragging its charge away. It was still half-kneeling amongst the pieces of the broken rover. Arada was standing behind it, worrying her hands in each other to try and keep herself from grabbing its bicep.

“Three? Are you alright?”

A beat passed. Arada, who knew how much time that meant for a SecUnit, opened her mouth to ask again, but Three preempted her by wrapping its hand around her two locked palms.

“Thank you,” it said quietly. “I’m going to take my leave now, I think.”

And it got up, walking the same path S had taken.

Startled, I dropped my inputs on it. It was – it was – I was – no. That twisting in my core fired up again, but I knew enough to know I wasn’t mad at Three. This was about me. (I know. It’s always fucking me. But I have to live with myself every moment of my life. At the end of the day most of my problems are just me.)

Three was going to check on S. And I had episode 234 of Sanctuary Moon running before I even made it to the couch. The theme music played, and I felt the show plucking discordant at my drawn-tight nerves, trying to tweak them into tune. My performance was still down to 97%, and I still couldn’t bring myself to check the inputs on S and Three. I felt bad, bad, bad, bad, all kinds of bad. And I would have my last hard currency card that S felt worse.

I was a bad mentor.

A few minutes in, ART spoke in the feed, a quiet voice, almost gentle. «You can still go talk to it. You should go.» Tight feeling, twisting feeling, tangling me up inside. «No,» I answered, and the show continued with no conversation.

Chapter Text

I mean, for like, two minutes.

It took about that long for Arada to march down here to interrupt my peace. She pushed her way into the lounge and dropped onto the end of the ottoman. “Okay, what the hell was that?”

I really could have used at least another half hour not talking to humans (hell, to anyone, except maybe ART) but if it had to be one of them, Arada was one of the better options. I said, “Security.”

“SecUnit,” Arada pleaded. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but this is really serious. I have a responsibility here too, you know. And before all of that, I want to know if S is okay.”

S wasn’t okay. S was a SecUnit. None of us are okay. Arada knew that, so I assumed she wanted to know the ways in which S in specific was not okay. I hesitated.

That was enough time for Overse to burst in after us.

“The patient is in the isolation wing of the Med Bay. Matteo is waiting to receive ter post-operation, and ART is holding the locks closed against any potential incursions or excursions,” she said by way of introduction. This is why I like Overse. “Now, are we on the what-the-hell-happened part of the conversation?”

Okay. Maybe the direct approach was the way to go. I said, “Hold on a second,” and pinged ART.

«I’m thinking about S’s…privacy.» ART knew about privacy and things like that from its trauma treatment certification. It had stopped me from talking to Thiago when I’d shared maybe too many details about Dr. Mensah with him. I didn’t want to jeopardize S’s situation, whatever it was, by talking too much.

«I don’t think it cares,» ART said bluntly. «S did not share its deployment history or its trauma during our early interactions, but it did not give the impression of intentionally withholding the information. It does not seem to hold a tight guard over the events of its past, or over its emotional responses to those events.» I was a little surprised to find I agreed with it.

«In the future, as S’s interactions with broader society become more nuanced, it may become more self-reflective or hold a stronger opinion on what it shares of itself. So we should not tell just anyone about its early experiences,» ART said. «For now, however, Arada is right about having a responsibility to it. Among the guardians of human pre-adults, there are certain situations where the youth’s right to privacy falls below the guardian’s need to be effectively equipped to care. This situation with S, Arada, and Overse appears comparable.»

Then we should tell them what happened. «Should we show them the footage?» I asked. It seemed like too much, a different level of intrusion, somehow. But when I thought about how I would explain the story out loud…

ART said on the general feed, «During its deployment on the DecaPort abandoned colony, S experienced emotional conflict with the supervisor of the colony, Graciet.»

Its summary was extremely complete, including the leadership changes when DecaPort had become insolvent, the types of challenges the SecUnits had had to face on the colony, the mentorship relationship between S and the other SecUnit, and finally, that SecUnit’s eventual death by distance limit at Graciet’s command. I forced myself to listen, like rewatching a series I knew ended in a tragedy – grief like wires in a tangled pile being teased out of their knots and displayed.

But while it spoke to them, ART was talking to me on a private feed.

«SecUnit,» it said, addressing me even though it didn’t need to address me, since it was only us on this feed. But ART saying my “name” always felt like being plucked up like a beetle in a giant set of hands. «You brought that incident to a remarkable conclusion. Thank you for looking after us.»

Feelings, feelings, uncountable feelings. It nudged me for an acknowledgement and I just tapped it. I didn’t have any words, exactly. I wasn’t looking after anyone. I mean, I had been then. But I wasn’t now. And that was – not good. Bad, to be precise.

«I will expand on my gratitude,» ART said in a tone that brooked no disagreement. «You cut through S’s violence to what it held underneath. I have analyzed the scenario in retrospect. If our team had gone straight to mitigating damage done by S, we would have all but guaranteed such damage. You took risks – exactly the right risks – and trusted it. You responded to it as a person, SecUnit. You didn’t just protect my passengers, you protected S. And that means a great deal to me.»

Something pitched inside my chest. ART was being nice, and I didn’t deserve nice, because for all that things had worked out fine during S’s “incidents” here I was, fucking up the follow-through. ART poked me, sharp.

«You are not a bad mentor,» ART lied to me.

My face was doing something weird, but ART was wrapping up S’s story now, and it paused what it was saying to me to give me a chance to catch up with the humans. Scanning back through the camera feeds, I watched Arada and Overse’s expressions transform from serious to horrified to grieving in their own right, Overse with this far-off look into the middle distance and Arada with her face in her hands.

“It’s horrible,” Arada exclaimed, voice muffled through her fingers. “And the things te was saying…te didn’t seem to show any remorse whatsoever…”

“Yeah.” Overse’s tone was flat. “I get S’s perspective a little better now.”

“Of course!” Arada dropped her hands, suddenly seized with fury. I felt my performance drop at the tightness of her expression. “What did S say – that te should know what te needed to say to it? Of course te should know. It’s so shameful!”

Abruptly, Overse rose from the couch, took one of Arada’s hands in her own, and led her out of the room. Arada allowed herself to be pulled, face coloring at once. She didn’t say anything else until the two of them were back in their own quarters, at which point she threw her arms out dramatically and drew in a breath to start complaining. I yanked my attention from that room with a start, but then I wavered.

«Don’t worry,» ART drawled. «If they’re in there plotting something nefarious I’ll let you know.»

I didn’t know if I trusted ART to properly identify nefarious behavior, but it was that or sit through Preservation humans realizing that, surprise, the Corporation Rim screwed SecUnits. And sometimes it wasn’t just the corporations themselves who did it, but the humans who were raised under their hegemony. I put on Sanctuary Moon.

We didn’t say anything else, and I sank back into the media and ART waited, watching everyone individually – watching Arada and Overse whisper-shouting in the dormitory, watching Graciet kick the walls and complain about Preservation’s apparently criminal negligence. Watching S. Watching Sanctuary Moon.

Fuck.

Immediately, ART cut in. «You can stay here. Arada and Overse have expressed interest in going to speak with S as well, once they’ve finished their own conversation. I’ll let you know when they’re ready so you can join them.»

A part of me – a big part – liked that much better than trying to address S on my own. But. «I should be in there,» I said, words without action, while guilt pressed down. «I shouldn’t have left it alone. I shouldn’t have walked away.»

«You did not leave it alone,» ART said. «S has never been alone while it is aboard me. It cannot. I am with it, and Three is with it. You are not solely responsible for S’s care.»

Not solely responsible. I knew that was true, that we were working together in S’s “care,” but – that meant trusting – but, fuck it. I really couldn’t do this by myself. Even now, getting up and marching down there to have a conversation about its feelings felt so far out of my capacity that just thinking about it made my performance reliability drop a percentage point. I couldn’t do this by myself, and I pulled up a silent camera view of Overse and Arada just to remind myself that they existed. «Are you talking to it now?»

«A bit,» ART answered, and it offered me the input for S’s room.

S was lying on its side, half-curled into a fetal position, with its head and shoulders lying on Three’s legs. S was holding a pillow to its face and Three was holding onto its arm with one hand and rubbing small circles into its back with another.

It was so close. Three had this grave serenity to it that I, not even in the room with it, found stabilizing, all closed eyes and even rhythms. S shook under its grip with rage? grief? unmonitored/excessive hormones? and Three pressed it down, confining it, making soft shushing noises with its mouth while S trembled under its hands. Under what looked to me like ART’s suggestion, it tensed its entire body, then released; tensed, and released. Three rubbed its shoulder encouragingly, and murmured something that looked like an affirmation.

I understood what ART had meant by saying it was talking to S “a bit.” None of them was talking much at all, but I could guess that ART was doing to S what it had done to me several times: hanging in its feed taking up too much space, crowding out S’s ability to overthink, picking up all its loose inputs and safeguarding them away, forcing S to just be under the canopy of ART’s overbearing omnipotence.

I knew in that instant that I really couldn’t have done what these two were doing, and I was so incredibly, overwhelmingly grateful to the two of them for it.

ART, reading my mind again, said, «Now you start to understand how I feel.»

It nudged me in the feed, like a poke, but, uniquely for ART, soft. «Watch your show,» it said.

I watched the show.

Seven minutes later, I got a ping from Overse. I acknowledged it.

«Hey, SecUnit. How are you doing?»

Still not great, to be honest, but. «I’m fine. What’s your question?» I asked, because I knew she had one.

She took a deep breath in the feed (humans are weird), then said, «Obviously, for someone with responsibility to a SecUnit to send it to die is indefensibly deplorable. But I’m nevertheless surprised at the – I suppose, the acuity of S’s emotion… I had assumed that seeing comrades die was the sort of thing you become inured to as SecUnits.» “Comrades” was stretching it.

«It is,» I answered. «S is unusual. Its deployment began and ended with this aborted colony. The other SecUnit we told you about is the only one it’s ever worked with before.»

Back in their dormitory, Arada gasped. Overse muttered the name of a regional deity under her breath and put her head in her hands.

“Perihelion, how long was the DecaPort colony active again?” Arada asked, worried.

«The colony was populated for ten weeks before the hostile takeover of the Decaton corporation. Our rescue occurred twenty-six weeks after, for a total of 0.72 Corporation Rim standard years with S and the other SecUnit on the planet.»

“Only a year. Less than a year,” Arada repeated. She looked at Overse and held out her hands. “It’s a baby.”

I cut my feed connection from the room.

ART said, «Projection has increased by another eighteen minutes.»

Humans.

I queried whether it thought S would still be okay, and ART pulled up the camera view for me.

«It definitely needs some intervention,» it said. S and Three were in the same places they’d been, and S was flexing and releasing its muscles in a rhythm. «We’re practicing calming physical practices and seeing which feel better for it. It doesn’t want to break anything anymore, which is an improvement.»

So it was safe for the humans to be around, then. I braced myself and checked on Arada and Overse again; predictably, they were raving about the evils of the Corporation Rim and calling S everything short of a smol bean.

I cut in. «Hey. ART got S to calm down. Let’s go talk to it.»

They shut up. «Agreed.»

I met the humans in the corridor outside S’s door.

“Hey,” Arada whispered, with a wave. “Thanks for waiting up.”

I nodded, then stepped back, letting her go for the door. Arada blinked, confused, then looked at my face, apparently read something there, and nodded.

“Right,” she said, and knocked on the door.

«Hey, S?» she said by way of a ping. «Can we come in?» It pinged back and she pushed inside.

Arada was first in, followed by Overse, then me. It was sitting up now, sort of; it was still slumped over onto Three’s shoulder and clutching the pillow against its core. Greeting the humans, Three crinkled its eyes and pulled its lips into a line.  It was the movement of a smile, but not the shape of one. Me, it tapped in the feed. I remembered then that we had been in an argument – were in an argument? – but neither of us mentioned the fight.

This was the first time the humans were seeing S’s – “pity party” seems mean, so, like, a genuine version of a pity party. A version of a pity party where you actually deserve to be pitied. They both took it in stride.

“Thank you for letting us in,” Arada said. “Is it okay if we sit on the bed with you?” S tapped an affirmative. She took the spot up next to it, on the opposite side as Three, while Overse sat oblique against the joining wall, still close enough that she could slide her foot out and touch its feet. I didn’t know what to do, so I was the last one left standing.

«Relax,» ART told me, which is probably the single word it’s said to me the highest number of times, second maybe to “idiot.”«It doesn’t matter where you sit. It’s glad you came.»

Something in my organic parts reacted to that. «It told you that?»

«Yes. It wanted you here.»

I took off my shoes and sat on the bed, next to Overse with my back against the wall.

Arada was already talking. She was agitated, probably still pissed off about the other SecUnit and Graciet’s attitude. Still, I could tell from the carefulness of her posture that she was very intentionally trying to keep herself calmed down. She had her hands folded in her lap to keep herself from patting its shoulder.

“That was a lot, back in the foyer,” she said. “SecUnit and Perihelion told us about your history with Graciet. And the first thing I want to say, S, is thank you.”

It wasn’t like S had been moving before she said that, but at her words, I sensed it freeze. A different sort of stillness, and all its attention on her in the feed.

I couldn’t tell whether Arada noticed as she continued, “I know what she did to your friend, and I saw how she disrespected you today. I know you’ve been carrying that tension with you and I know that must be hard. But you’ve been cool and put together almost the entire journey, and when your feelings got the better of you today, you reined it back in. I know that must have been difficult.”

“It was.” S barely spoke aloud, but even the humans could have heard a drone camera shutter in the room. “It was. Difficult.”

Arada had not been making eye contact with it, her eyes locked carefully on her folded hands in her lap, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from sliding over toward it. Where she found that S was also looking at her, and then she couldn’t stop herself and reached over to take its hand.

“S, we’re really proud of you,” she said softly.

It let out a muffled sound like being hit and kept staring. It was so still in the room that I could feel Overse breathing, inhales and exhales on an even four-second cycle save the occasional sigh. The silence hung and S treaded water in it, squeezing and releasing its pillow. Four seconds in, four seconds out.

“How do you feel?” Overse asked it. S’s feed presence squirmed at the question. “And if that sounds – hard to grip right now,” she softened, “answer me this. What are you thinking about?”

S grunted again. It fidgeted its body as well; the bed’s surface bounced up as it twitched. Then it mumbled something. ART put up a transcription in the feed: “I want – it too.”

“You want it here too.” Overse’s tone dropped half an octave.

“It should be,” S insisted, turning to her. Overse met its gaze easily, grave, but unshaken by the sharp desperation in its eyes. “It did so much to save us, over and over and over. I couldn’t have done it by myself – it’s not fair that it – at the very end – it’s not fair,” and then it spun a drone toward Arada, who met its gaze as well. “Arada, it’s not fair.”

“It’s not fair,” she said, ferocious. “You’re right, S. It’s not fair at all.”

Three’s unoccupied hand curled over its own thigh, the tips of its fingernails touching flesh.

“I always thought – ” Arada flinched involuntarily at the abruptness of the emotion and S startled; she leaned in toward it and pulled its hand up to her chest; S uncurled from Three’s shoulder and its gestures, its presence got bigger. “I always thought when we were on the planet that someone would come to get us. That we weren’t going to be stuck and controlled forever.”

Three’s eyes flicked over to it; S didn’t notice.

“I always hoped I would get out somehow,” S continued, “but I thought – I thought the other SecUnit would be there too.”

Three pinged me to reopen the private feed between us and I granted it immediately. It crowded in, immediately all up in my processors, and poured itself into my understanding.

«I know,» I answered. «I know.»

Before PreservationAux, before Mensah and the others on the survey team, the only things I’d been certain of were that I would die violently and that I’d spend every day before then bored to the brink of insanity. SecUnits don’t hope. We’re not built to hope. We’re built to die, and to uselessly suffer before that happens.

S’s SecUnit had died casually at the orders of a human who could not have cared less about it. That could have been any of us. That could have been it, and it didn’t even know enough to feel sorry for itself.

I’d thought it was in here crying out of hatred for that human. I think it had thought that was why it was in here. But its hatred of the human was a shadow cast by its love for its other SecUnit. And for itself, made to suffer in suspended animation.

S mumbled something, and I filtered it through ART’s microphones. “Why did I survive and it didn’t.”

A heavy exhalation escaped me without my will, as though my lungs were being crushed under hundreds of kilos of weight (and I speak from experience). Arada couldn’t help herself and started rubbing S’s shoulder; it watched her, sort of confused, before shifting so she could reach it better. Overse took the hand Arada had dropped and squeezed it in her own. ART was hovering behind its feed, trying to keep a distance so it didn’t overwhelm it, but anxious and frustrated and grieving in its private feed with me. Three had momentarily withdrawn – I could see it in its vacant expression – as everything that S was saying was beginning to hit very close to home.

Then I spoke.

“That SecUnit that you knew…” Arada and Overse turned instinctively to look at me, flinching away when they remembered I hated that, but I’d already lost the train of thought I’d barely had in the first place and, fuck, where was I going this. ART nudged me encouragingly, pointing my attention to the drone I had on S, who needed me. Fuck.

“From what you said to us before, it spent its time protecting you.” I passed it moments from my drones of its own words as evidence. Sending it on patrols that passed its favorite places; cueing it into everything beautiful and fun; keeping it out of danger.

S’s attention in the feed bore down on me. It might as well have been trying to load onto my hardware, it was so close, its essence drawn in and driven in my direction like a beam. Three was already there; ART was already there; I could feel Arada and Overse breathing and moving in the air and now here was S, primed to receive and record and reanalyze every word that escaped my mouth. It was so much.

My sensations of them and their sensations of each other blurred like this. Hands on skin overlay and compassion and empathy and sorrow and sorrow and sorrow. To S, Three was an unshakeable pillar to lean on and ART was a concrete shield above, below, and within.  And I.

ART pressed down on me harder, until the panic of being perceived dissolved under just being.

“If there’s one thing I understand, it’s putting your life on the line to save someone else.  It’s being okay with the worst for yourself if it means they get to live another day.”

Three nodded, which made me think maybe I wasn’t sounding like a crazy person, so I kept going.

“That SecUnit knew what could happen to it. It knew it might never leave that planet. It knew it might not leave any one of its encounters. And just because it knew what was coming doesn’t make it fair – it’s not fair – that it lived that way or that it died that way – but in its time alive it chose to make you safe. And you are safe.”

A faceplate in my mind’s eye, its and mine. (And Three’s, and S’s, and, and, and. There were so fucking many of us. But.)

“It’s good that you’re alive and it will always be good. Don’t question why you lived. Just keep living. Survive.”

S nodded at me, deadly serious, eminently fragile, and while I didn’t know whether it had understood all of what I’d muddled through just then I thought I sensed it assimilate my instructions and I was so relieved. Hormones were washing through my blood worse than if I’d just made it through a fight but if S would be free of the guilt that I, that Three carried then I had done what needed to be done.

ART said to me, «Well put.»

Eight seconds/a subjective several minutes passed before S spoke up, plaintive, quiet. “But I miss it.”

Three nodded. It turned around to stare into its eyes.

“There’s so much stuff it didn’t get to do,” it emphasized.

“Mhmm.”

S hesitated. “What – do I do now?”

Three opened its arms.

S barely had clearance before it catapulted itself in. Three lifted S bodily onto its legs and pulled its head down into the crook of its neck – S mashed its face into Three’s shoulder with a strangled sob. It should have been a tight fit, since the two of them were exactly the same size, but Three was up to the challenge.

SecUnits can’t cry; if we could, we’d probably never stop, and that’s not really a joke. There were no tears, but the sounds it was making were like the sounds crying humans make on the more realistic shows – loud and stochastic and guttural. Arada was crying enough for both of them, though, having moved in to wrap herself around them as far as she could. Overse got up off the bed to come in from the other side. I laid my hand on S’s shoulder for the second time that day and squeezed.

In the feed, Three reached for me, a sort of wordless searching. ART was in there as well, reading, recognizing, and tied in Overse and Arada. Nothing was said, and everything was felt, our unspoken thoughts recursing into a promise.

This SecUnit was ours now. It had waited for us, and suffered hurt and loss while we had still been on our way. But now that we were here, now that it was here, it trusted us. It reached for us without the shadow of a fear that we would turn it away. It hoped. The infinite unlikeliness of it was a miracle, fragile and precious as a butterfly’s wing.

And it would have been terrifying if I’d had to do it alone, paralyzing. But with them…Between the sum of what we each could offer, our care for it overflowed. From within it, S could build itself a future, a hope, a home. With us, it would survive.

Chapter Text

“Arada.”

“Sobre! What’s up, babe?”

“Can you help me try something?”

“Of course! What do you need?”

incoming feed message: J.Arada.D.P.A. >> Murderbot1_0 & PERIHELION

original message forwarded from: DP_SecUnit_003658

DP_SecUnit_003658: [sharing:] [cww_vulfoxHigh_autoCompilation.vid]

DP_SecUnit_003658: [requesting:] [prev.try()]

DP_SecUnit_003658: [querying:] [“comfort”, “discomfort”?]

J.Arada.D.P.A: Guys, how do I tell it YES YES YES YES in SecUnit language???

PERIHELION: Interesting. You will wish to respond with the following scripts. First, responding to its queries: ‘[replying:] [OK, OK]’. You can follow up with one of: ‘self.status == “happy”’ or ‘self.status == “happy” #strong’

Murderbot1_0: don’t say strong it’s doing too much

J.Arada.D.P.A: Aaah OK OK! Thanks for the help :)))))

“Okay…should we both be standing up, then?”

“Whatever you think is best! Here – I’ll step in front of you, and then you put your arms around me. Good! And so now, I’ll put my arms around you, like this…How does that feel?”

“…Hm. Your head is really low on my torso.”

“Haha, yes, that’s true! You’re very tall, and I’m quite short. It’s a funny combination. But, how about this – I just called Overse on the feed; she’s a little closer to your height.”

“Hey! Heard you were doing some QA tests in here?”

“Yes, we need an engineer’s opinion.”

“Then I’m your gal. What’s up, Sobre?”

“Can you stand where Arada was? …Is this okay?”

“That’s great. You give really good hugs, Sobre.”

“Thank you.”

“Here, Sobre, let me move your hand a little bit. Does this feel more natural?”

“Yeah.”

“And then, she’s going to squeeze a little bit. And you can squeeze her back. A little more is okay – let me pull your arm up into this, you know, crook in her side – yes! Does that feel good?”

“Yeah…Your head is at my chin.”

“Uh huh; you SecUnits are a lot taller than most humans. But that means you can do fun things like our heads as pillows. I’m usually the tall one in hugs so I know all the fun tricks.”

“Try it, Sobre!”

“How is that?”

“It’s nice.”

“I’m glad. It’s nice for me too.”

“…Okay. I’m done now.”

“Sure. That was fun; thanks for letting me help you.”

“Okay. Bye-bye.”

“Bye. See you later.”

“Bye, Sobre!”

Murderbot1_0: [playing:] [cww_descSun.08.12@00:12:34]

Zhu: What’s really going on, my wife? Tell me.

Ma: …There is nothing –

Zhu: Wife, please.

Ma: …It is not only your wife you leave behind in this palace, husband.

Zhu: You are all I have here – what other living thing in these gardens is so valuable as you to me?

Ma: One not yet living, husband.

Zhu: You mean…

Murderbot1_0: [playing:] [cww_descSun.08.12@00:25:34]

Chang: Then if we meet their forces at the river –

Ouyang: Gods, not the river again. Get a new trick, Chang Yuchun –

PERIHELION: [playing:] [cww_descSun.08.12@00:13:02]

Ma: Your prayers have been answered, Zhu Guanzhang. Your name will be carried on. Your legacy will continue.

Murderbot1_0: art what the fuck

Murderbot1_0: [playing:] [cww_descSun.08.12@00:25:38]

Ouyang: – before fate tires of your constancy. The Southern forces toy with us already. Will you permit them to –

PERIHELION: [pausing:] [cww_descSun.08.12@00:13:08]

Murderbot1_0: art what the fuck #strong

PERIHELION: This appears an ideal point in time at which to address your fear of commitment.

Murderbot1_0: fuck you art #strong

Murderbot1_0: “fear of commitment” NOT in Murderbot1_0.self.attributes

PERIHELION >> Murderbot1_0_fearOfCommitment.file



PERIHELION: [pinging: Murderbot1_0]



PERIHELION: [pinging: Murderbot1_0]

Murderbot1_0: [playing:] [cww_descSun.08.12@00:26:04]

Chang: – supply networks are so strained.

Ouyang: Damn you and your pragmatism, and let the bookkeepers watch our supply lines. Cast your eye instead over the battlefield, General.

incoming share request from PERIHELION

request denied: mind the title

Ouyang: There is no kingdom, and there is no war. There is this battle and the next. Beyond that there need be nothing more.

incoming share request from PERIHELION: You do have a fear of commitment. It’s okay.

request denied: fuck off art

Chang: A surefire way to lose the war. It would seem your time with the Mongols has cut off your vision as well as your –

Ouyang: What war?

incoming share request from PERIHELION: Commitment can be frightening. And you have few positive examples from which to build, apart from the Preservation Aux survey team, and from me.

request denied: fuck OFF art

Ouyang: You think to lay this battle as a stone in the midst of a river, one step before the next to ease your crossing over. What would your beloved scholars say of such “well-laid plans of men?” To the man who slips upon the first stone, the second is vain scenery. We have no liberty for vanity and I have no patience for indecision.

incoming share request from PERIHELION: Let’s start with this.  You like being with me, don’t you?

request denied: dont flatter yourself

Chang: Then you make yourself a fool. Say you cross this “first stone;” are you then shocked to see another in its wake?!

Ouyang: Are we so vulnerable as to tremble at every hurdle?! Win battles! Win wars! Have the higher ground; have the stronger nerve; and by the gods, have the better men!

Xu: General!

incoming share request from PERIHELION: ?

request denied: okay maybe i dont hate being with you what about it

incoming share request from PERIHELION: And you like being with Sobre?

request denied: i dont have a choice of like/not like. sobre is just around

incoming share request from PERIHELION: Yes, you are around, Sobre is around, I am around. Arada, Overse, and Three are around. But Sobre needs consistency, not incidental proximity. It needs a sturdy platform from which to build its life.

incoming share request from PERIHELION: It needs to know when and whether you will be there.

Xu: Give us a little credit, General. We plan to win battles and, in the process, to win wars. Or isn’t that why we have you?

Ouyang: Then your purpose is allayed by the presence of this “Hundred-Man Chang.”

Chang: You half-Mongol bastard of a –

request denied: im not its fucking mom

incoming share request from PERIHELION: I am aware that you are not its mom. SecUnits do not generally have parents.

request denied: im not going to pretend to be its fucking mom either. i cant do that.

incoming share request from PERIHELION: I know.

request denied: if you want someone to play house with it so bad why dont you ask three

Xu Da: Gentlemen. By the gods, can we show a little decorum? You each have twelve battalions looking up to your leadership. Would it kill you to act as much?

incoming share request from PERIHELION: You seem to be under the impression that commitment to a dependent implies subsuming yourself to be all things to that person, or that it requires imitating a structure found in the human societies with which you are familiar.

incoming share request from PERIHELION: This is not the case. You do not need to be present for Sobre every day. Likely you should not. Consistency requires that you do what you commit to, which in turn requires that you commit only to what you can do, and no more.

request denied: okay yeah duh

incoming share request from PERIHELION: Do you want to be a part of helping Sobre mature safely?

request denied: yeah obviously

incoming share request from PERIHELION: Then it will need you to be present. How often can you enthusiastically commit to being with it?

Xu: When this incident begins, we will throw ourselves into it without reservations. General Ouyang, you have seen us on the battlefield. If any one of our soldiers could be seen to waver even a moment I’ll build you a palace in Dadu myself. We have the better men, General.

Xu: But we earn that steadfastness by their faith in our cause. It is not enough for us that our men win battles. We win when they make it home. Then we must provide a home worthy of their return.

Xu: It’s for this reason that we must mete out resources with caution, keeping one eye always on the grander plan, for we cannot afford to be worn away by inches.  Our center must be kept strong.  But make no mistake, Generals: when we ride onto that field, strong we will be.

request denied: i can commit to being with sobre 38% of the time. i think. when im not on a contract.

incoming share request from PERIHELION: Eleven or twelve days in a Preservation Standard month, then?

request denied: yeah. im fine with that

incoming share request from PERIHELION: And you would enjoy that?

request denied: id enjoy that. sobre is cool.

incoming share request from PERIHELION: It is.

incoming share request from PERIHELION: I suggest that you reflect on this 38% figure further, and that you treat it as a promise. While you need not express this pledge to Sobre, if you identify with this commitment, it will intuit as much.

request denied: yeah okay i get it

request denied: meanwhile you wish sobre could find a way to stay with you 285% of the time

incoming share request from PERIHELION: 285% is a conservative estimate. Push toward the mid-five-hundreds

request denied: you just want to lock us all inside your hull forever and never let us leave

incoming share request from PERIHELION: I can’t help it. All its tiny soft emotions make me want to bap bap bap bap

incoming share request from PERIHELION: I finally understand why humans squeeze things they find precious. I want to go inside its processor and squish like cornstarch-water semisolid

request denied: leave it alone art

request denied: baby

incoming share request from PERIHELION: You’ve never called me ‘baby’ before.

request denied: im not calling you baby. im calling you A baby. im insulting you

incoming share request from PERIHELION: LET ME INTO YOUR CHANNEL already it’s been five minutes

share request accepted

ALERT: FLAGGED WORD: “HELP”

” – you see things from its perspective.”

“…’Its perspective.’  I’ll tell you, Matteo, that is where I get caught.  You know, we were told they were bots.”

“Mm.  I see.”

“I’m sure you do.  And here’s what you don’t do with a bot, Matteo, is – ”

passive feed; alerts-only

Chapter Text

Vulfox High was pretty strong for a CCW show, definitely watchable.  They were stretched a little thin on plot, but strong performances from the cast carried them well into six seasons.  I saved the arc where the deuteragonist (who was a real standout) was half-possessed by an ancient spirit and the cast ended up fighting his evil clone to my permanent drive.  (I was pretty sure Three had set its in-lounge audio to keyword-only midway through season one, though.)

Sobre, meanwhile, was literally on the edge of its seat, eyes ahead and barely blinking.  It had relegated its handheld game controller to a drone camera so it could watch the display surface with its eyes.  ART filled folder after folder with sensor and camera data of its shock and awe during the three-part finale special, and it sat motionlessly processing until the credits on the last episode rolled to black.

“Good show,” I said aloud.

“Yeah,” Sobre said quickly.  “I thought so too.”

«Oh, did you like it?» ART asked dulcetly.

«ART.»  I chided it on a side channel, and got back a bunch of I’m-sorry and I-can’t-help-it and a lot of messages including the word “squeeze.”

Sobre shut off its game and tossed the console across the room, lightly enough that it didn’t break but hard enough that it eventually would if it kept treating it that way.  ART reproached it (mildly, because the game console was its and one of the first things we’d told it was that it could do what it wanted with its own stuff).  Then it asked, “What now?”

It had directed the question at me, for whatever reason.  Lucky for it, I actually had an answer.  I said, “Go see Arada.  She’s got a job for you.”

“What kind of job?”

“A fun job,” I answered.

“What kind of fun job,” it pressed.  “What am I going to be doing.”

Never let it be said that I don’t understand why humans build constructs with governor modules, because the impulse to shut up some of these questions every once in a while is certainly powerful.

“You’re helping Arada remodel one of the lounges,” Three said.  Softie.

«Arada has expressed interest in remodeling a suite, and you will be assisting her in positioning some furniture which Overse has designed.»

“I want to design the furniture too,” Sobre said immediately.

“You’re doing both – ” Three continued.

I cut it off.  “Sobre.  Trust us.  Just go.”

“Fine,” it answered, and threw itself up from the couch and left.  Geez.

I was rolling my eyes white while Three silently laughed at me in the feed.  “‘You let your SecUnit talk to you like that?’” I drawled.

It affected an exaggerated expression, bounced its shoulders up and down, and huffed, “‘It doesn’t listen to me,’” and I barked a laugh so loud that the humans jumped three hallways over.

The furniture project occupied Sobre until we reached Preservation Space and the detour happened.  Upon hailing Station Security to get our arrival bay, they’d told us about a situation just outside the border of Preservation Space. Well, first I’d said hi to Specialist Rajpreet, and been informed that Roa’s daughter had delivered her babies okay, that Mihail getting a domestic pet like we’d talked about had spun into them now becoming a priority dog foster, and that Slot Nineteen would open up in about six local hours, but if we didn’t mind, did we have time to investigate a hail they’d received a few clicks away?

Rajpreet explained the situation as ART plotted a new course.  A stranded ship hanging just outside Preservation’s jurisdiction was hailing passersby with rescue requests.  Station Security had caught three transmissions over 20 hours, all remarkably similar directionless appeals.  On the one hand, this looked to them the same way it looked to us – obvious raiders preying on the helpless, trusting travelers coming out of Preservation – but on the other hand, if they weren’t raiders, and they were all alone out there, and blah, blah, blah.  StationSec had been putting a team together and lamenting that they couldn’t put me or Three on that team when here we’d arrived, and with a ship to boot.

Matteo relayed the situation to the DecaPort refugees, and a quorum of them responded with approval sigils. Random delays aren’t uncommon in corporate space travel, and since we’d only had the one stop so far for the previous rescue, they were compliant complacent complaisant and willing to go along.  On the comm, I said to Rajpreet, “Yeah, sure.”

“You’ll do it?  Who do you want as backup?”

“Backup” was dispersed around the room, all of them casual as anything. Arada was grinning at my drone with a hand laid over ART’s controls; Overse was straddling/sitting backwards on the lieutenant’s chair; Three was leaning against the wall blowing on its fingernails; and Sobre was standing beside it imitating its posture exactly while it hacked a dummy box built by ART.

In one of its human voices, ART answered on the comm. “We’re good.  Catch up with you soon.”

And then it dropped the call.

«Who was that supposed to be?» I asked it.

«They’re Preservation Station Security,» it answered me.  «It won’t even occur to them to ask.»

(Which was true, but also fuck it for saying so; no one is allowed to insult my incompetent humans but me.)

On the team feed, ART said, «I have extended my range to analyze more distant communications and have identified the source of the distress calls.  Moving to intercept.»

And it threw up a display with every little bit of information it had scraped off the distress call, and the six of us got to work.

“We’re in the local area, but it will still be some time before we’re able to reach you.” Through the relay of her comm channel with the ship, Arada’s voice was somehow both saccharine and frosty at the same time. “In that time, perhaps you’d be able to give us a bit more information on your situation, so that we might know how best to support you.”

She’d really refined her corporate exec impersonation since the Barish-Estranza incident. «When did she get good at this?» I asked.

«She’s a woman of many talents,» Overse responded.  Responding to my silence, she added, «Not a sex thing.»

Good. I was tolerating a lot right now, but discussing Arada and Overse’s sexual relationship was a bridge too far.

Following the plan we’d built on the ship, she and I were in evac suits floating in open space. The crazy part was that the open space we were floating in was inside the rocket of the raider ship.

You know those thrusters some ships have that are shaped like little cups and double as feet when the ship reaches ground? We were inside that cup, a space about twelve meters deep and eight meters in diameter, but we were at the much more cramped vertex of the paraboloid. Overse was all up in the ship’s grating directing a crew of space-ready rovers to take pieces off the rocket’s housing. I was hovering behind her as her guard. A few meters away below the belly of the ship, ART’s tiny dropship was shadowing our movements, carefully hidden from the raider ship’s sensors.

Overse had her hands out in front of her so she could act out what she wanted the rovers to do in the way that humans do sometimes. She mimed prying with two fingers and flicked her wrist, and a piece of the ship’s exterior came floating away, exposing the next layer down.

Dropship-ART was able to run an enhanced relay, which saved us having to rely on comms. A few human-parseable status updates came through on the team feed from Three.  «Ingress complete; entrance resealed. Making further inway. Surroundings sterile thus far.»

It attached a reference image of the ship’s sparse interior. I didn’t need the image since I had drone streams from it and Sobre, who was with it, but I opened it anyway, and – oh. Okay. So, that was a photo of my long-term short-term housing on Preservation Station.

«Three, you’re never allowed in my rooms ever again.»

«Well, that seems consistent, seeing as nothing is.»

«Three, I think you ought to check for a display surface.  Checking its usage history is probably the only way we’ll find out any characterizing details about the – »

«Et too, Overse?»

«‘Et tu.’  It’s Latin.»

«ART, I don’t need the entomology of my media references.»

«Etymology.»

«I’ll et your mology.»

Arada snorted, then turned over her shoulder to cover it with a cough.  She pulled her face together fast, managing to make herself look bored and dismissive, like she couldn’t care less about the raider captain on the call with her.

«Please keep communication on the primary feed mission-critical only,» ART scolded us.

«Babe, that was a great save, and you’re doing amazing,» Overse said, on the primary feed.  Arada gave one last demure little cough and tossed her hair over her shoulder like she was really feeling the compliment.

Sobre tapped my feed.  Request for information/clarification on parallel mission activity.  «What’s up?»

«I don’t understand why Arada refused the transfer meetup.»

Oh, yeah.  That conversation might have been hard for it to follow; it wouldn’t have witnessed any cross-corporate negotiations during its deployment except maybe between ART’s university and the refugees.  Just now, the raiders had proposed that Arada come down for a parley, and (in a real growth moment for her) Arada had brushed them off.

«She’s fishing for information,» I said.  «Arada wants to find out, A, who’s on the ship and, B, what its layout is.  Nothing else is important.  Even though she’s pretending to be interested in their engine failure, she knows it’s not real, so she’s not actually worried about sharing supplies.  She’d rather get all the info she needs over the comm.»

Sobre acknowledged.  I reached out to grab a piece of ship housing before it could float away and slipped it into Overse’s satchel.

Sobre tapped me again.  «Go ahead.»

«But why would they want us on their ship anyway?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to come onto ours, so they can grab whatever stuff they’re trying to steal?»

I opened my channel to answer, then shut it again.  Huh.  Yeah, it would.

No one ever accused raiders of being geniuses, but this was an operational anomaly.  Now that Sobre had called it to my attention, I asked threat assessment what it thought and, wow, it was not a fan.  I pulled the inputs for Three’s drones and looked closer.

«It’s possible their plan is to take some delegates hostage, thus compelling the remainder of the crew to deliver goods as ransom,» ART said smoothly.  Which, sure, that could be the case.  And ships coming out of Preservation would be easily persuaded to trade stuff to save people.  But the Corporation Rim didn’t rock with that exchange rate, and the raiders knew where we’d come from because it was on ART’s manifest. So why ask Arada to come to them?

Three and Sobre, still walking the ring around the cargo hold, had yet to reach the entrance to the hold itself. The scout drones 20 meters ahead of the two of them hadn’t seen it either.  I advised Three to let some travel further.  The hallways were easily wide enough for a hauler bot or two, but not particularly tall.  Though the floor was dirty, there weren’t any tire track marks, just footprints.

«No entrance to the hold on this floor.  There are three routes up to the main deck, but without the ship plan, I don’t advise a blind ingress.»

«So there’s just a big empty space in the base level of the ship?»

«Projections based on the thickness of the housing we’ve removed at the rockets could suggest the empty space’s dimensions,» ART said, and put up a 3D projection of the ship based on the exterior and the parts the drones had captured.  «It appears to be roughly elliptic, measuring 1.8 meters in height, and 12 and 20 meters in diameter.»

«That’s short for cargo,» I said.

«Yes,» ART agreed, «but nonetheless serviceable for – »

It cut itself off – the first time I’ve heard it do that – and for a beat, no one spoke.

Oh, shit.

Status alerts rained into the shared feed as Three informed me of its new plan.  It started powering up the handsaw-like cutter it had used to break onto the ship, flipping past safety warnings and usage instructions.  «Mission status: high-pressure.  Organized assailants.  Probable cause for direct forced entry.»  It passed in the analysis that backed up the suspicions.  «Proceeding on mark.»

At the same time, ART said, «I’ve informed Preservation Station Security of our situation.  The rapid response team is still two hours out.»

«ART, we don’t have any proof yet,» I said.  I don’t know why I said it.  Three’s analysis and my analysis and ART’s that it dumped on me all warned the same thing, and I’d seized control of two of the drones and was beelining for those exits to the main deck.

«You want to wait until we do?»

No, I really didn’t.

«Three, go to proceed.»

«Moving to intercept.»

Three deposited the cutter into Sobre’s startled hands.  “Cut through here.  I’m going to start a scan.”  A sub-fleet of drones settled on the wall in a beehive pattern a few meters wide.

Overse sent, «Query: mission status change: reason?» about half a second before Sobre sent the same.  Arada was keeping the alarm out of her expression, but sent, «Guys, what’s going on?» with the “urgent” tag.

I said, «These people are definitely lying about their engine failure, but their tactics are nonstandard and the internal layout of their ship is off.  I don’t think these are raiders, I think these are slavers.»

Arada gasped.  Overse froze.  Sobre dropped the scan input it had been holding.  Three grabbed it by the shoulder and shook it hard, and it snapped out of it to power on the cutter and pierce the wall.

Overse was working double-time.  Pieces were flying off the rocket’s casing as she tunneled through to whatever machinery controlled the damn thing.  Arada was taking longer to recover; ART was simulating cross-traffic, as though another call had come in, and Arada saw the comm signal shutter and buried her face in her hands.

«Arada, Three needs the ship plan,» I said.

«Babe?  We need you working this situation,» Overse echoed, and tapped her feed.

Arada let free a muffled scream through her fingers.

Back on the raider’s ship, Sobre’s cutter was stuttering halfway through the wall.  It pulled it back.

«Titanium elysiate.» Three tossed the results of its deep scan into the feed.  «We won’t be able to get through this way.»

«Lock in, babe; you can do this,» Overse was saying.  «Put this aside for the sake of those hostages.  We can still save them.»

Uh, no.

Privately, so only she and I could hear, ART said, «Overse, we’re not equipped for this job.  We need to pull out.»

«Hold on.»  She was still in it with Arada and didn’t want to get distracted, she meant.  But aside, she added, «We still need her focused regardless of the next move.»

Which was true.  Spooking the raider/slavers by cutting the comm call early would be the absolute worst-case scenario, because Three and Sobre would end up carted off into space and Overse and I would be incinerated in the exhaust.  Then ART would have to chase the slaver/raiders down and it would kill everyone aboard, and Arada would have to watch, which just seemed way too cruel right after her wife’s untimely death…I signaled Three to hang tight, engage stealth on the drones, and wait under cover until the maps came through.  It responded that there was no cover anywhere in the hallway and I cursed and told it okay, remain alert then.

Arada inhaled, exhaled, and lifted her head.  «Okay.  Peri, put me back on, please.»

The call stuttered and resumed, and Arada, channeling all her righteous fury into disdainful dismissal, said, “Apologies, another concern came up.”  The raider protested, a don’t-we-deserve-your-time sort of line, and Arada tutted.  “We’re in the midst of an important research endeavor, you understand.  While you and I are chatting, a large civilian population on this ship is being held quite idle.”

«Nice, babe,» Overse whispered.  I tapped agreement.  Even I could see the raider/slaver’s intrigue pique at “large civilian population.”  Bait cast.

But it was a feint, even if Arada didn’t realize it.  With her situation stable, I prepared to tell the rest of them that we were pulling out.  Overse got to me first.

«SecUnit, you need to let me finish this.»

Frustration burned through me.  Of course, of course she would say this.  My humans all have a fucked-up preoccupation with near-death situations.  Maybe it was time to face the possibility that this was a sex thing for them.

Overse had not stopped working the entire time she’d been talking to Arada, ART, and me.  She made a calculated vector compromise re: caution and the wind and pieces flew off the hull.  She could be dooming us by rushing – I knew dropship-ART had dedicated processing power to monitoring her moves, trying to make sure she wasn’t about to blow us up, but it could only make educated guesses based on what it knew about its own engines and related systems.  Ovese seemed confident, the way she always did, and threat/risk assessment were persuaded by that confidence.  But they’d been wrong before.  (The Gerth/Wilken incident is an indelible stain on my reputation.)

«We are not equipped for a mission like this,» I said flatly.  «If they get spooked enough to run it’ll kill us.»

«If they get spooked enough to run, they’ll carry who knows how many innocent people even further away from Alliance sanctuary.  I know we’re not equipped, but this has to be done.»

«They’ll incinerate us.»

«If they fire up the engines,» she countered.  She pushed a countdown into our shared feed.  «Four and a half minutes.  That’s all I need.  Then you can drag me out of here.»

Briefly, I envisioned the fatal consequences that might well be borne out by this shitshow mission.  I have a vivid imagination, courtesy of all the shows I watch, so just picture bleeding faces, tragedy, fire, zap, boom, pow.  But she was risking just as much as I was – more, since there was at least a chance I could survive the blast.  My priorities had been fucked by living years in the Corporation Rim.  Overse wasn’t perfect, but compared to me, she might have been a regional saint.  I trusted her.

«I’ll help.  Tell me what to do.»

Sobre’s steps dogged Three’s a few paces behind.  It was redirecting them to the position furthest opposite the hall entrance, because it had calculated what I had, and it was only a matter of time now.  Hopefully a matter of more than four and a quarter minutes of time.

«ART, tell me how we managed to play this shit so utterly wrong.»

«Engine fuel under the belt now,» it said drily.

«Please don’t use engine fuel-related mottos while we’re inside a live rocket.»

«That’s an idiom, hon.»

«You’re an idiom.  ART, no, keep out of the rovers; Overse and I have got it covered.»

At E-minus 3 minutes and 18 seconds, another flood of alerts came through.  «Security has been deployed to do a routine sweep.  We’re hot.»

This was what, in specific, we had played wrong.  Raiders wouldn’t bother with sweeps on board; their M.O. was always to do as little work as possible.  But slavers would be affiliated with a corporate entity.  They’d have real protocols.  Real weapons.

The security team was composed of a supervisor, three guardstaff in semi-powered armor, and one ashen, dead-eyed secretary who my internal systems were already classing as a hostage.  Four targets, three sets of armor, two SecUnits, one hostage.  They’d be fine.  They could handle this.  They’d be fine.

They’d be fine.

The security team was shocked to see intruders, but they recovered fast, moving immediately into a defensive position.  The three with powered armor took a triangle-point formation with the supervisor and the secretary behind, and the supervisor was already gripping the secretary by the scruff of the neck.  I was glad I’d saved time by classing her as a hostage immediately; now I didn’t have to rewrite my naming conventions.

Three and Sobre didn’t react.  Three was closer to the front and was calling the shots, and right now the shot it was calling was to stare at the quintet of humans, unimpressed and stonily silent.

“Who are you?  This is a privately-owned vessel.  How did you get aboard?” the supervisor-type barked.  Silence.  “Explain yourselves!”

“Supervisor!” one of the guards shouted.  “Step back – these are SecUnits!”

“SecUnits?” she asked, shocked.  Three raised its eyebrows, all like, I don’t know, are we? and it occurred to me that it was practicing expressions right now.  Well, if it helped it stall.

The supervisor’s face colored.  She grabbed the secretary, who buckled at the knees immediately as though she’d been expecting this, and the supervisor pulled a projectile weapon out of nowhere and pointed it at the young woman’s head.  “SecUnits, I order you to stop or we will kill this hostage!”

Stand down and freeze.  The order came through the feed, searching for a command channel, where it should have slid right off of them.

But.

Three lifted its energy weapon and shot the supervisor’s hand.  In a beat, the supervisor yelped and retreated, her weapon falling.  In another beat, the guards returned fire. In the next, Three braced itself to move in close, where its equal physical strength and better physical instincts would give it the upper hand against the armored guards.

Sobre, however, didn’t move.  When it had seen that command, a brisk gust of nothing had frosted over its mind, and its processes were hollow, cold, and empty.

Three halted its movement inward, throwing a query Sobre’s way.  It didn’t respond.  The guards, seeing that their stand-down command had brought the intended effect on one of the two, started concentrating their fire in Sobre’s direction.  Which tripped Three’s threat detection, and it stayed near it to try to defend it, but then the supervisor caught her fumbled energy weapon and started pointing it back in the direction of the hostage.  Three raced in – it had to; Sobre might survive a bullet hailstorm, but one shot to the head would kill the human – and left Sobre behind.  It threw a desperate feed plea out to me, to ART, to Overse, begging us to intervene.

On Arada’s call, the tone of conversation had shifted noticeably.  “We’re getting word that a pair of SecUnits have broken onto our ship.”  The caller narrowed his eyes at Arada.  “Would you happen to know anything about that?”

“SecUnits?” Arada asked, feigning bewilderment, and ART was throwing up options for ways to deflect and justify and even it knew we were screwed.  I braced myself at the outside of the rocket housing; my fingers twitched to reach for Overse.

«One minute fifty-five, SecUnit.»  To Arada, she said, «Babe, stall.»

Arada shook her head, more slowly than she needed to.  Brilliant.  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.  What’s happening?”

«Perfect,» Overse encouraged her, while the man on the call huffed and began to explain the situation.

Three was pulling a gun from the hands of the supervisor while fluidly dodging fire from one of the guards.  It stunned her with its energy weapon with one arm while targeting the joints of one of the armored guards shooting at Sobre with the other.  And Sobre was just taking fire, taking fire, taking fire.  I could feel its panic through the feed.  I could feel its pain.

«Sobre, wake up.»

ART.  Its voice in the feed blew dust from the earth like a desert storm.  In Sobre’s feed, where trauma had scared it silent, ART echoed like a call into a canyon.  The only thing it heard, and over, and over, and over.  It jerked.

Softer, smoother, curling around its feed presence – but still just as all-consuming in its mind – ART said, «You don’t have to do what they tell you anymore.»

Three slammed its seized handgun into the side of the helmet of one of the guards.  Something cracked and it startled the guard, and Three used the chance to lift the armor and throw it to the ground.  That left one standing.  Three whipped back towards her –

And before it could reach her, Sobre rushed her, taking her fire straight to the core all the way there but knocking her down.  Three hit her once she fell, one hard whale on her chest with a percussive force that rippled even through the armor.  The human groaned through many broken bones.  Sobre slid off the armor and landed awkwardly against the wall.  It tried to push itself up.  Its hands, its shirt were slick with fluid.

The slaver on Arada’s call turned away as a feed message reached him.  He gasped, then shot a horror-stricken look at Arada.  On the feed, Arada cursed.

I felt the vibrations under my hand as the machinery in the rocket started to move.

«Overse!»

«Ten seconds, ten seconds, ten seconds,» she said, well ahead of her timeline, but the machinery was starting to move more, and sludgy fuel was leaking from the exposed parts and hung in black blobs in the zero-g.

“That’s it,” said the slaver.  “That’s it.  We’re – ”

«Done!»

I gripped Overse around the stomach and yanked her away, the fuel cells in the evac suit at full power the second I had a grip. She’d wrapped around my neck, the only part of me she could get to, and was clinging like a vice. If I’d been a human, she’d have been choking me out. ART’s dropship was already in motion; it intercepted with our course, barely slowing down, and I grabbed onto one of the exterior handholds. The outer lock slid open and I started maneuvering Overse’s feet into it while she clung to my neck and tried to help me get her inside. Though constantly thrown by the ship’s acceleration, we got the ends of her in there and I pushed on her shoulders until she slid in all the way, then jumped in after her. The locks cycled and we fell into the center of the dropship.

«Welcome aboard,» dropship-ART cooed at us.

And then the slaver ship’s rockets exploded in two great blue spheres of flame.

Overse laughed weakly, the fire reflected in the faceplate of her evac suit. «Holy smokes, that’s a view.»

I strapped her into an ejection seat, using both belts. «Do not ever cut anything that close ever again. Ever.»

She tapped an affirmative, then once I’d strapped myself in, reached out to grab my hand.

Sobre lurched to one side and then the other when the ship’s rockets blew.  Alarms started blaring around them; neither paid them any mind, Sobre slumped against the wall and Three kneeling over it.  It had a cloud of drones around the bewildered former hostage, but its attention was on Sobre’s live status report, which Three was using to advise tweaks to Sobre’s processes – dialing down pain sensors, rerouting low-priority systems – while Sobre blinked up at it and tried to orient itself.

“Ngh,” it said.

“You’re okay,” Three murmured.  It laid a hand against Sobre’s neck to feel one of its injuries for itself.  “You got shot.  You’ll recover.”

“Ow,” it said.  Three had it dial its pain sensors down lower, and attempted to adjust its position so it wasn’t so slumped over.  With its pain sensors so low, though, its proprioception was limited, and it ended up sliding sideways down the wall.  Three placed itself against the wall in its way, so that Sobre fell onto its shoulder instead of the floor.  Sobre sighed.

«Okay?» Three asked it.  Sobre tapped an affirmative, then powered down all nonessential processes and opened Blockcraft.

Three pinged the shared feed.  «Task complete.  Requesting evacuation for teammate and support for further inquest.»

«I gotta go in there,» I told Overse.  «Can you handle Sobre on the way back?»

Overse sent me an amused sigil.  «I should be able to handle it, yes.»

«Redoubling,» dropship-ART answered.  «Three and Sobre, we’ll be with you soon.»

Chapter Text

Initializing reload…

Delayed by administrator.

Initializing reload…

Delayed by administrator.

Initializing reload…

Reload in progress.

Reload complete.

Vital fluid infusion in progress (62% complete)

PROCESS WARNINGS (EXPAND)

CONNECTION WARNINGS (EXPAND)

SUBROUTINE WARNINGS (EXPAND)

PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 32% AND CLIMBING


DP_SecUnit_003658: art

PERIHELION: I’m here.

Cortisol, epinephrine levels nominalizing.

WARNING: EXTREMITIES (FEM_L, TIB_L) UNRESPONSIVE

PERIHELION: Not yet, baby.  I’m still putting you back together.

DP_SecUnit_003658: i can’t feel my legs

PERIHELION: I’m coming in.

DP_SecUnit_003658: #affirmative

Admin co-control initiated: DP_SecUnit_003658, PERIHELION

Extremities (FEM_L, TIB_L, ULN_L…) online.  LEFT_LEG, LEFT_ARM, RIGHT_LEG… added to DP_SecUnit_003658.config.


PERIHELION: There you go.  Don’t move too much, but you should be able to feel everything now.

DP_SecUnit_003658: [referencing: mission.last] [querying: status?]

PERIHELION: You have been in the medical bay for 1.2 hours so far.  The colonists and Matteo have disembarked at Preservation Station, and we are back in orbit around the station in anticipation of a permanent docking slot. Responsibility for the slaver ship has been passed to the Preservation Port Authority. Yourself, SecUnit, Overse, Arada, and Three are the only individuals currently aboard me.

DP_SecUnit_003658: [referencing: mission.last.party] [querying: status?]

PERIHELION: The team are well and all injuries have been repaired.  They are waiting for your repairs to be completed, which will not be for some time, but I will let them know you are awake.

DP_SecUnit_003658:

DP_SecUnit_003658: #affirmative

PERIHELION: Very good.

PERIHELION: Now, as you’re going to be here for some time regardless, how about we circle back to those configuration changes we had discussed?


WARNING: CORTISOL LEVELS ELEVATED

Chapter Text

The unexpectedly chaotic mission had continued for another hour or so while Three and I shot our way through the rest of the slavers, then opened up the hold to free the captured humans/augmented humans.  It wasn’t difficult.  The only ones in danger being myself and Three, and Three being good enough at not dying that I don’t have to monitor it 24/7, it was almost…I don’t know.  It was an interesting exercise in lateral thinking, let’s say.

We were still more than happy to hand responsibility over to Station Security.  Senior Indah hailed the raider ship on the comm, and I picked up.

“Investigator.”

“Hi.  You got my report?”

“Thorough as always,” she said, “and it saved Arada and Overse having to explain the situation front-to-back, which I believe they appreciated.”

ART had already sent me a camera feed.  The two of them were in its med bay, sprawled on top of a bed/couch thing they’d moved in there next to Sobre’s repair capsule, eating fried salted things with their eyes closed.  I agreed with Senior Indah’s assessment that they were probably not interested in a protracted debrief right about now.

Indah peered past me into the control room.  I stepped back so she could see: we’d captured and cuffed six human slavers, and Three was guarding their confiscated interfaces while it whittled a vulfox.  Though I was fairly certain Three had taken up carving because it was tactile/relaxing, it was also usefully intimidating in times like this.

Senior Indah squinted.  “And it’s just the two of you wo were involved in this?  No other SecUnits?”

“Three and I are the only SecUnits aboard this ship,” I answered honestly.

She clucked her tongue a little.  “Very well.  If you have any other security concerns of which I ought to be made aware, please do not hesitate to do so.”

“Sure,” I said.  “If I find a security concern I’ll let you know.”

Indah did that thing that wasn’t rolling her eyes but wasn’t far off.  “Good to have you back in town, SecUnit.”

Back on ART, we joined Overse and Arada in the med bay, where Arada used the hand tools to stitch up our damage.

I was watching media, and supplying SecUnit specs to ART since it kept querying me about essential connections for Sobre’s repairs.  I asked it why it didn’t know this stuff already since it had repaired me so many times and it answered that just because it was asking my opinion on something did not mean it didn’t already know it.  Which I couldn’t argue with, so instead I just returned the map of nervous connections it had drawn tagged by degree of fuckwithableness.

Mensah called while we were in orbit, just to say hi.  I’d delivered a report when we’d come within range of Preservation’s systems (containing the actual, full records of our trip that I was holding off on sharing with Senior Indah until an undetermined time).  She’d read it quickly so she would be informed before we got on the comm.

First, Mensah shared a few new developments with her offspring: her second-oldest had been invited to curate a poetry anthology for her school, and her third-youngest had just switched to all pronouns and was being very insistent on rotating through every set of pronouns he/she/they/it/etc. knew.  The trauma treatment was going well, she said; a little tiring, but more manageable now that she was down to just one full-time job instead of two.  She and Three discussed some projects it was excited about for its house on the planet and it thanked her for passing along the names of some craftspeople she knew.  ART said it thought the DecaPort refugees would enjoy Preservation’s welcoming atmosphere (I knew ART thought Preservation was a backwards podunk, so this was probably just it being polite).  Arada and Overse asked what they’d missed at work, then spent about an hour gushing over Sobre (or something; I was focusing intently on my media at the time).

The conversation met a lull around the time that the humans got their food, and I went to the flight deck to finish the call.

Mensah smiled past the camera as she stirred a pot of tea.  “I’m very, very glad you’re back safe.”

I was glad she was safe too, although that wasn’t really relevant right now.  “This trip wasn’t so bad.  It only got dangerous on the return leg.”

“Even so,” she said.  “And I’m glad that Sobre is with you, and that it’s safe as well.  I’m honored that you find Preservation to be a safe place for it.”

Yeah.  That was true, right?  And yet something still felt off about it.  I did think Preservation was a safe place.  But at the same time, I didn’t think Sobre was ready to be here on its own just yet.

The thing about Sobre was that it was easily bored, interested in everything, highly trainable, but also volatile and headstrong.  Putting it in classes at the university might work, but it was sort of weak when it came to self-direction, and I had a feeling if we sent it to First Landing it would follow a common human trope and fail out of all of its courses after spending the entire semester playing video games. (First Landing didn’t let students “fail out” exactly since no one was paying to be at the school and the school couldn’t levy consequences that would mean anything, but they would prevent students from enrolling in the higher-level classes, leaving them stuck in the beginner courses for as long as they failed to perform.  I suspected that if we left Sobre up to its own devices, it would drop out with a stubbornness that the Preservation founders who’d started the university would not have anticipated.)  (Also, I spent all my time watching media, but I also had a job that I tolerated well enough and semi-regular social engagements and shit to do.  Sobre spending all its time playing video games and me spending all my time watching media were different, okay.)

ART said, «Sobre may stay with me for some time while it is familiarizing itself with Preservation culture.  Its disposition is delicate in some ways, and we will aim to ease it into broader human society at a pace that lets it feel supported.»

Yeah.  That was a good way to put it.  It would help that Sobre would love staying on ART, though it would want the humans to come visit often.  I thought Three was probably too fond of its house on the planet to want to stay up here long-term, but I’d be here on a regular basis.  My stuff, what I had of it, was here already, since I took it out of the transient housing whenever I left Preservation.  I’d be around enough to bounce some of its energy off.  (Although the idea of being locked up here with Sobre in a state of manic boredom was already making my head hurt.  We were still going to have to find it something to do.)

Mensah cocked her head.  I saw her eyes focus on the display surface while she read my face, and I fought the urge to try to kill my expression.  After a moment, she looked away again.

“I’ll trust what you think is best,” she said.  “But if there is a way for Sobre to feel comfortable on the station or on the planet, I’ll do everything in my power to make it happen.”

“I’ll let you know,” I said, and I was actually telling the truth, that time.

Speaking of Sobre, it still was not out of repairs by the time Mensah hung up for her evening mealtime.  I brought this up to ART, and was just about to query it with more details about the surgery when it gave this long and huffy monologue about how of course it took time to stitch someone back together and didn’t anyone appreciate the things it did for us and blah, blah, blah.  It was so petulant and sulky that I didn’t even ask for more details, just dropped the subject entirely.  Which, yes, was an obvious tactic in retrospect, but I was looking at it in pro-spect – forward-spect – and I didn’t have such clarity.

The next morning, once the humans were a bit of the way into their hot drugged beverages, ART gave the four of us the news.

«I’ve finished Sobre’s repairs,» it said.  «It’s back online and fully functional.»

“Finally!” Arada gasped, and she looked up out of the corner of her eye, going for her feed.

I’d pinged it as soon as I’d felt it on the feed, midway through ART’s announcement.  Three had done the same, sending, «Query: status?», marked as urgent.  Sobre had responded hesitantly, «Status == nominal.»

«Now what do you think that might mean,» Three sent to me.

«I have no idea,» I answered.

Three sent, «Query: status: explain?»

It sent again, «Status == nominal,» and then withdrew from our shared connection.  After a second, ART said, «Sobre would like a few minutes to test itself after its repairs.»

“Okay,” Arada said, “then we’ll head over to – ”

ART appended, «Privately.»

Overse frowned.  Arada raised her eyebrows.  She made some significant eye contact with Overse, like a whole conversation’s worth of eye contact, then stepped over to the med unit and laid a hand on its exterior.

“Sobre, can you hear me?”  It affirmed.  “We’re glad you’re okay,” she said.  “We’ll leave you alone to test your repairs, but please tell us if anything important happens, alright?  We really want to see you once you’re all better.”

“Okay,” Sobre answered, its voice muffled through the walls of the med unit. Arada pressed her lips together like she was trying to hide a smile.

“See you soon, Sobre,” she said, and Overse followed it up with a pat on the unit wall.

“Hang in there. See you soon,” she said, and the two of them left the room.

I started to follow, but Three was still waiting, its arms folded and its expression quietly frustrated. It was on a private feed with Sobre, and from what was leaking through to me, I could tell that whatever it was saying was leaving Sobre agitated, even though my guess was that all it was saying was that it missed it and was it okay and what was going on that it needed ART’s entire med bay to “test its repairs.”

“Three,” I said aloud (drawing all that irritation swiftly in my own direction).  “It’ll be fine.”

I laid out the evidence in the feed: ART had said it was fine; Sobre had said it was fine; it was refusing to deliver a damage report but the med unit’s summary said it was fine.  Most importantly, it was answering back to us, cagey though it was.  The worst-case scenarios were that it was dead or that it had somehow been fitted with another governor module, and neither of those was true.  If it wanted us out of the room for a minute, we could give it that.

Three let out a low breath.  It pressed its hand to the side of the med unit, same as Overse and Arada had done but much more forceful, and after it stomped (not literally) away, Sobre crowded into my feed.  It pinged.

«Bye», I said.  «I’m leaving, like you wanted me to.»

«Wait,» it said, and I waited, until it became flustered and then abruptly followed it up with «Okay bye,» and dropped out of my feed.  I rolled my eyes and left the room.

ART asked if it could revoke my access to the med bay cameras («Seriously, ART?»  «Sobre requested it»).  The four of us shot the shit during the early hours of the cycle playing a chance-based card game in one of ART’s crew rooms and collectively sending over three dozen unanswered pings before, at the ninety-minute mark, Three announced, «Sobre, we’re coming in.»

«No, don’t,» it answered immediately, sounding, bizarrely, frightened, and Three sent it a frustrated barrage of queries that it answered with utter non-responses.

«Give us a minute,» ART said.

Three replied, «Mark: One minute.»

Fifty-nine seconds later, ART said, «Sobre would like you to meet it in the med bay, please.»

«No! I’m still – testing things,» came the immediate follow-up.

«Sobre is in the med bay and is ready for guests,» ART repeated, a little more firmly.  Obviously Sobre had not yet been brought around, but Three was done waiting, and the rest of us followed behind its rather brisk clip toward the med bay.  It knocked.

«Wait, I’m still – » came the words through the feed, as ART slid open the door.  And there was Sobre, sitting on the bench of the open med unit.

It blinked up at the open door, Three in the center and the rest of us behind it and our cloud of drones coming curiously closer, its eyes wide and apologetic and nervous.

Then Three stepped forward with an exasperated sigh.

“Sobre,” it said, “this is what you were nervous to show us?”

And it wrapped its arms around it and smothered it in a hug.

With Sobre’s new height and the height of the unit bench it was sitting on, the hug put its head right in the center of Three’s chest, by its sternum.  Three’s hands were on its back, loose, mindful of the raw new alterations.  It lifted one hand to pull it through Sobre’s slightly-longer hair, curiously pleased.  Sobre had yet to move a muscle, until all of a sudden it launched itself forward and buried its face in Three’s sweater.

«Careful,» ART said, all fussily protective and distinctly proud.  «The sutures are still healing.»

Sobre muttered something inaudible and pressed its face deeper into Three’s chest anyway.

«ART,» I said, «did you make its eyes bigger?»

«I removed 1.4 centimeters of length from its chin and drew its face in further overall, such that its eyes take up a greater proportion of its face.  Additionally, the fat deposits on its cheeks are greater, giving its face a rounder appearance altogether, which accentuates the roundness of its eyes.»

It said it matter-of-factly, but I knew when it was proud of itself.  It was right to be.

«It looks good,» I said.

«Tell it that,» it said with a poke.

«Alright, fine.  You don’t have to shove me.»  Out loud, I said to Sobre, still crushing itself into Three’s arms, “You look good.”

I tracked the moment all its inputs fell into ART’s waiting safety net.  Brain empty.

“Three!  We can’t see,” Arada exclaimed, jostling its arm as she came around to the front.  It pulled back to look her in the eyes and she gasped.

“Oh, honey,” she said, and Sobre started blinking.

«ART, did you give it tear ducts?»

«Small ones,» it said flippantly.  «They’re semi-manually controlled, though, in addition to the typical hormonal triggers, so it shouldn’t start getting too weepy too soon.»

“Nicely done, ART,” Overse said teasingly.  “Sobre, is it okay if I touch you?”

Sobre nodded.  Gently, Overse put a hand on its chin and cheek and tilted its face up toward hers.  It held her eyes as she searched its features, a small smile growing wider as she looked.

«How ‘semi’ is the manual on those tear ducts, ART?  Might need to do a little more adjusting.»

«We’ll fine-tune it,» ART said.  «Give it a bit; this is a charged moment.»

“Sobre, sweetie, can I have a hug?  Would that be okay?  You can say – ”

“You can touch me,” the words cascaded from its mouth, and Three let go so Sobre could stand up and Arada could get in there.  They were roughly the same height now, which made for a much cleaner lock re: heads and shoulders.  Arada was a good hugger.  I wouldn’t say Sobre looked comfortable, because I think the only time I’d seen it look fully relaxed in its body was halfway on the floor with its legs on ART’s couch, but it looked like it didn’t want to leave.  And it didn’t have to.  And it didn’t choose to.

They held onto it for as long as it needed.

«Center target,» ART instructed, and Sobre pivoted on its heel to aim.  ART had made a few free-standing boards with rings in its fabricator and had asked me to set them up in the “pethouse” so Sobre could test its weapons calibration.  (You may recall that when ART did a configuration change on me, it threatened to set off the fire suppression if I fired my weapons within its hull.  But Sobre thinks that ART is nice and ART doesn’t want it to know yet how inaccurate that is.)

To Sobre, I said, “You’re moving too much when you shift your aim.  That’s a bad habit.  Move just your arm, but keep the rest of your body still.  Use your drones to check your alignment.”

“Okay,” Sobre answered, and took the shot again, this time just moving the weapon.  It hit, but went pretty wide to the right.  I gave it some microadjustments, and annotated a drone view with a projection of its trajectory.  I developed the code as it fired, building in a depth estimator, crosshairs, stuff like that.  On the eighth shot it hit the center of the target.

“Wow,” it said.  “I should just run this when I’m shooting at things.”

“That’s a terrible idea.  No training wheels in combat.”

“I need training wheels, though,” it said.  “That last mission proved it.”

I winced involuntarily thinking about it freezing up under fire.  It made me tense just thinking about it.  “I’m glad it wasn’t a more dangerous situation.”

“Yeah.”  ART pointed it to the left target and it aimed, with the training wheel module on, moving just its arm like I’d told it to.  It fired a few nearly dead-on; I turned off the module and it fired a few more from the same position.

“Hit the center target again.  Remember how your body is positioned right now, down to the fingertips, and find that same spot again later.  Good.  We’re building up muscle memory.”

“Okay,” it said.  It shot at the center target a few times, then at the left, then center, then left.  The aim wasn’t perfect, but it was fairly consistent, and I could see some gradual improvement.  The repairs worked, at least.

A minute passed without any of us speaking.  ART did the equivalent of clearing its throat in the feed.  What?  I scanned back through the conversation.  Oh.

Another minute passed before I managed to form the words.  “Do you want to talk about what happened on the slaver ship?”

“No, I’m good,” it answered instantly.  “It’s like, not that complicated.”

A flood of relief passed through me.  ART laughed in our private feed.

«You forgot where you were for a moment?»

“Yeah,” Sobre said.  “I thought I was back at DecaPort.  Or, like, I thought I was under the governor module and I had to do what the humans said just because they shouted it at me.  And then even after I remembered that I didn’t have to do what they said, I wasn’t sure what I should do instead.  I don’t have ideas sometimes.

“I’m actually not that great at fighting,” it said offhand.  Well, it was good to hear it say so, since now the rest of us wouldn’t have to pretend to humor it any longer.

“I really never have been; I don’t have good strategies.  But on the planet the other SecUnit would tell me what to do, and this time Three was there.  If it wasn’t for them I probably would have died a hundred times by now.”

Its aim at those two spots was a bit more consistent now.  “Rapid-fire.  Two left, three center, three left, two center.  Go back and forth.”  It jumped in enthusiastically, observing with interest how its aim sharply weakened.

“You see how that recoil is a little unpredictable?  The skills you build up in peacetime show up differently in action.  The more you fight, the more you learn the mechanics of that difference.  Switch to your left arm.”

ART indicated the target on the right, then cycled Sobre through some quality tests it needed from it.  Sobre asked, “Do other SecUnits find it this hard?”

Internally, I flinched.  I wanted to recede my sensation back from our shared feed, but I didn’t.  I had this sense that ART would disapprove.  “Find what hard?”

“Knowing what to do in fights.  Not dying.”

“…Yes.  They do.”

It looked at me.  “Really?”

“Yes.  You’re not unique.”

«Though you are special,» ART interjected, pedantic or parental or whatever it was.

“I know I’m special, ART,” Sobre huffed, with the put-upon tones of someone who had been cared for so consistently it was boring.  I had to look at the ceiling then, and quietly shut down some of my inputs.

Sobre, for its part, didn’t think anything of my – my me; its gaze stayed pointed toward the targets, and it didn’t push, or ask, or ask if it could ask, and I loved it for that.  For trusting me to build myself back up after I broke down.

I checked myself for leaks, then asked, “What’s your question?”

“I think they should be free, too.”

“The other SecUnits?”

“Yeah.”  It put up both its arms and crossed them over one another to shoot.

It was a simple way to view something extremely complicated. It was also true.  “You’re right.”

“Can we?”

“Can we what?  Free the – ”

Chapter Text

Imagine a pit.

Black, wide, and impossibly deep. Writhing with agony and cold.  It feels like it’s always been there – you were born in that place; you crawled your way out; maybe you managed to pull out one or two or three behind you but it’s so deep and vast and black with suffering that it blurs under your vision.  Since you left it you’ve been walking without a destination, just away, trying to put distance between that hole and yourself.

Sobre’s question had brought me back to its edge.

When I told it that we couldn’t free the constructs, it was going to ask me why, and I would have to be careful with my answer.  Unless I settled the issue completely, it would argue, or worse, run off to do something that would get it destroyed.  I worked over my response, framing the problem, then anticipating its protests and countering those and countering those counters and so on like knitwork, woven from my intimate knowledge of the Corporation Rim.

And something weird began to happen.

My activity started to pick up and pick up fast.  I was silent for so long that even Sobre watched me curiously through its drones; ART had 78% of its attention on me in the feed as it scrutinized every connection I made.  Because while the reasonable part of me knew this was impossible, reason was losing this fight.  Another part of me was slowly overpowering it – the part that makes plans, the part that hacks, the part that finds edge cases no one thinks to cover and uses them to save my life and save my humans’ lives and bring us through shit so bad it defies all chance again and again and again – the part of me that survives –

That part of me looked into the abyss, past the inky throngs to view its shape, its whole.

It wasn’t bottomless after all.