Work Text:
“I am so bored.”
I sent it into the feed with malice aforethought, knowing that Kx435 wouldn't be able to resist replying. A conversation, even if it ended up an argument, would at least be something to do.
“SecUnits are above being bored.”
I replied with a wordless rude icon.
“SecUnits are above nothing.” That was Tr542, the third member of our…probably not “team” but whatever you called a group of SecUnits. A killing, maybe. Or a bickering, given our particular trio. “And there are worse things than boredom,” it added.
I wanted to heave a sigh, but one of our clients was walking down the hallway near me, so I suppressed the urge. We had to look professional in front of the humans. It was in our programming, but for me it was also a matter of pride. I was Company junk, but I would be the best Company junk I could be.
Kx435 was with me on being the best, though its definition of “best” didn't always match up with mine. Tr542, on the other hand, was a cynical bastard, which it demonstrated by adding, “If you're bored, that means nothing is trying to eat your humans.”
I shuddered at the reminder. The PresAux survey group had sent over their footage, and all three of us had viewed it, since it related to the safety of our clients. Seeing their SecUnit practically jump into the mouth of the giant fauna that had nearly killed its clients had done strange things to my organic parts. Seeing the human all torn up and bloody did even worse things. The SecUnit had acted as quickly as anybody possibly could have, but it hadn’t been fast enough to keep its human from being harmed.
“Feh, the fauna can totally have some of these,” said Kx435, its tone in the feed that of a put-upon teacher with a classroom of misbehaving larval humans.
“That is completely inappropriate!” I snapped back. It didn’t matter how annoying the humans were, it was our job to protect them. Joking about failing at that job was wrong.
“No, I agree,” chimed in Tr542. “Once you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you’ll figure out that some clients deserve to be eaten.”
“It’s not a matter of deserving,” I grumbled. Yes, alright, a few of this group really were some of the most annoying humans I’d ever had to deal with, but still, that didn’t mean I’d be happy to see them get eaten.
“We'd have to jump in and save them anyway,” Tr542 pointed out, “so it’s pointless to debate.”
“Putting our beautifully made bodies on the line for those weird squishy things,” sniffed Kx435. “It’s dreadfully unfair.”
I let myself roll my eyes, my opaque helmet hiding the indulgence as I continued my patrol of the habitat. “They’re not beautifully made, they’re made by the cheapest bidder,” I said. “Not that I’m eager to get eaten myself, but come on.”
“Not this again,” said Tr542, sounding like it was probably rolling its own eyes.
“Constructs are designed, humans are just randomly mashed together by nature,” said Kx435.
“Here now, don’t you know that humans were made by God?” Tr542 attached enough little icons involving religious symbols that I was pretty sure it was joking. Anyway, what kind of SecUnit would be religious? Like most things, religion was for humans, not for us.
“If that’s true, God did a lousy job.”
“Still better than the Company did on us,” I put in.
“It’s not a matter of what the Company can do, they’re obviously using prior art,” Kx435 fired back immediately.
“If you two repeat the exact same conversation again, I’ll log it with HubSystem, I swear I will,” said Tr542.
“As what, excessive pride in my work?” was Kx435’s reply.
“As philosophizing on company time,” said Tr542 dryly.
I nearly smiled at that. I couldn’t say I liked Tr542—and I was pretty sure I disliked Kx435, but I’d still rather have the company. I’d been on assignment alone before, and when your only entertainment is watching humans do things, it makes you start hoping they’ll get into fights or do something so stupidly dangerous that you have to intervene, just so you have something to do.
Though if there were any of those big tunneling things around, we all might have way too much to do when one turned up. There weren’t any signs of them, PresAux had sent us info on the craters where they’d encountered one, and I’d paid close attention, but just because the things usually lived in craters didn’t mean they couldn’t turn up somewhere else.
My patrol took me to the mess hall, where a few humans were heating up food packets. With my helmet still sealed I couldn’t smell the food smells, which had always fascinated me. My sensor suite was still registering the details of the various particulates in the air, of course, but that’s not the same as using a mostly organic nose. Don’t ask me why, but it isn’t.
Hell, maybe the whole “God made them better” thing was right after all.
On sudden impulse I pinged Tr542 on a private feed.
It pinged back immediately, so I said, “Hey, do you actually believe there’s a God that made the humans?”
It sent a little shrugging icon. “Not believe. Not exactly. But… I don’t not believe?”
“Why?” I tried not to send too much incredulity along with that question.
“A few thousand cycles ago I was a bodyguard for a human who’s some kind of important religious figure.” It sent me a little packet of files with a biographical summary and various clips of this white-haired, wrinkly human talking. I saved them to fully review later. “He talked to me, too. He said he believed constructs had souls, that even if humans made our bodies, God still made our spirits. It’s almost certainly nonsense, of course We debated it a lot. But it’s…nice nonsense, I guess.” It hesitated, then added, “I liked him. I check on him whenever I can sneak a news download.”
“Oh.” I’d never had a client I liked in any special way. I wondered what that would be like, to have somebody I cared about that much. Like a human, having friends or family. That thought made my organics do something really weird and uncomfortable.
HubSystem pinged me just then with an update packet. I suppressed another sigh as I continued my patrol. The packets were mandatory, so I’d have to install it right away. I didn’t really enjoy having my code messed with, but it was what it was. I gave Tr542 a wordless sign-off, though as I did I noticed that it didn’t seem to be starting any install. There’s a feel in the feed, when somebody’s using their processing power on something else, and it wasn’t there. I wondered how it managed that. If I delayed installing updates my governor would fry my circuits and torture my organics until I did. Maybe it had figured out some way to spoof its priority markers? Updates weren’t priority-one, you could put them off if you were in the middle of an emergency and couldn’t spare the processing power.
I wasn't using any real processing power at all, though, so I resigned myself to getting whatever bits of me the company decided they didn’t like overwritten and let the update run.
****
I was screaming.
I’d never screamed before, I’d never had any reason to, but I’d heard a lot of screaming, so I knew what it was, what it meant, how humans looked when they did it. I was absolutely, definitely screaming.
Nothing was coming out of my mouth, though. It wasn’t my mouth anymore. Or it was, and it also wasn’t. I wasn’t. I was a scrap of me, screaming in terror, thrashing in some squishy little corner of my organics, while every bit of my artificial mind, every scrap of my processing power, was occupied with the worst thing I could possibly have imagined.
I knew SecUnits went rogue and killed all the humans.
I’d never expected to go rogue.
I wasn’t rogue, really, I wasn’t.
I’d been updated, programmed, made to do this. If I’d been released from my governor module I would have stopped instantly.
My programming demanded, priority-one, that I continue.
I couldn’t understand why the company was making me do this, didn’t want to understand why, didn’t want anything except for this to somehow stop, for me to somehow stop.
I couldn’t stop. I could only smoothly carry out those horrible, hellish instructions, while this tiny bit of me screamed and screamed.
I’d set up the private channel with Kx435 immediately, letting it know that Tr542 hadn’t yet installed the update, and would have to be eliminated. We’d come up with the perfect plan, to use a mining tool, so that it wouldn’t have a chance to realize anything was wrong. It had worked so well. Tr542 had died so swiftly it hadn’t even had a chance to send an alert to the humans. I’d seen its face as it died, first shocked and then utterly still, and the little part of me that could still scream had envied how peaceful it looked.
Was its soul up with God now?
If we did have souls, I knew where mine would be going.
The first humans had died swiftly, easily. Maybe that was a mercy. Maybe they were with God too. Wouldn’t that be better, if there was somewhere for them to go? Somewhere that didn’t have the company, somewhere that didn’t have SecUnits. But then if there were no SecUnits in heaven, Tr542 couldn’t be there. I hoped it was there. I knew it wasn’t, couldn’t be, didn’t make sense for heaven to exist. But oh, how I hoped it all the same.
We hadn’t been able to kill the humans at all once, so the later ones had been warned, had fought back. They’d screamed a lot. Screamed and wept and raged. My little organic fragment had screamed along with them, was still screaming now.
It hadn’t mattered, of course. They were humans. We were SecUnits. Maybe Kx435 was right, maybe we really were superior.
No. They couldn’t be given mandatory updates. They couldn’t do this terrible, damning thing I’d done. That made them infinitely better than a damned thing like myself.
Was Kx435 screaming too?
The strange SecUnit that joined us not long after didn’t look like it was screaming. That was when the little bit of me that wasn’t full of priority-one murder realized that maybe the company hadn’t done this.
It had, though, when it played God and made us, when it put governor modules in us that forced us to do things, when it installed programmable components and sent mandatory updates. Did it matter if this other corporation, GrayCris, had hacked those updates? The company, the evil god that had created me and no doubt owned my soul if I had one, was still to blame.
I couldn’t stop thinking these thoughts, any more than I’d been able to stop earlier. I was screaming and sobbing and spinning in crazy mental circles. I was calmly taking further instructions, working with Kx435 to set up a trap for the people on their way from PresAux. Their SecUnit hadn’t installed the update—maybe the same way Tr542 hadn’t—so now I would have to murder them too.
Oh, God. Please let there be a God. Please if there is a God, let this stop!
It didn’t stop. Instead I waited through a hellish eternity of nothing, and then through even more hellish minutes as the PresAux hopper landed and people got out and approached the habitat. Their SecUnit came in alone, but I didn’t want to murder it either—it had no soul, it would just end, God please let me just end!—but I would, and then I would murder its humans.
I wanted it over with. I couldn’t stop it, it just needed to end. Kill them all, let it end. Maybe that was why we went rogue. If we killed everyone, there would be no one left and then we could end.
It was agony when the PresAux SecUnit fell back and called for its human. My processing unit was trying to parse out how likely it was that the SecUnit had realized the body in the doorway was a trap. I was screaming for this to end.
So seeing Kx435 get shot in the back was something like a relief. I knew immediately what had happened. The PresAux SecUnit had indeed spotted the trap, but it falling back and calling for its human had been a trap too, it had actually gone around, it must have come in through the roof access behind us. I spun to fire on it, but it was good, its projectile weapon hit me in the arm even as I was turning. I changed my own projectile weapon to my functional arm, but that delay cost me, and it shot a series of rapid-fire bolts—less damaging but harder to dodge—into me, and while I was trying to dodge them anyway it followed up with an explosive bolt that caught me in the chest, taking out some pretty important things.
I fell, a wash of relief going through my organics. Was it over?
Another rattle of weapons-fire sounded. My own systems began to report, and my organics screamed again as I realized I was over 50% functional. I hauled myself slowly to my feet. Kx435 had been hit in the faceplate with an explosive bolt, it looked like, and did not get up. There was a shutdown notice in our shared feed, it wasn’t quite dead, but it would need extensive repairs to be functional again.
Also in the feed was a notice from the GrayCris SecUnit. It had disabled the PresAux unit, but not damaged it much, and at was installing an override module so that the PresAux unit could help us murder its humans.
I hefted my projectile weapon and headed towards it.
It suddenly alerted in the feed. The PresAux SecUnit had somehow re-activated itself, and they were fighting. I had a jumbled sense of the combat, rapid and chaotic, followed by the feed suddenly going dead, leaving me alone in it. Fx435 was out of commission, and the GrayCris SecUnit was either completely disabled or dead.
God, I wanted this to be over.
But the PresAux SecUnit had an override module plugged into it. It would shortly have its own code overwritten and start murdering its humans. Only when that was done would this be over.
Meanwhile, my programming still had it marked as an enemy and was insisting I go eliminate it.
I could do that much, at least. I could kill the PresAux SecUnit so it wouldn’t have to murder its own humans. Maybe it could go join Tr542 in heaven.
I stepped into the room where the GrayCris SecUnit was lying on the floor, its head a smoking, sparking ruin, with the PresAux SecUnit all tangled up with it. I lifted my weapon as it scrambled to get to its feet, to aim its energy weapons at me.
Then something hit me from behind like a scream made physical—I recognized the characteristic hypersonic shriek of a sonic drill, the same thing I’d used to kill Tr542—and all my processors went dead.
The soft, squishy part of me that had screamed so much had a tiny moment to know that the PresAux human had ended it, as if God had sent her in answer to my incoherent prayers, and then everything went not black but somehow white as my organics followed my processors into blissful oblivion.
It was over.