Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I didn’t think I would ever see Tapan and Rami and Maro again after we left RaviHyral. They didn’t have any way to contact me and I didn’t have any way to contact them, and the Corporation Rim has a lot of humans in it. The odds of me running into them again by accident were so low that the number was barely even worth mentioning (I would mention it anyway, but I’d gotten embarrassed that I even tried to do that calculation and deleted the data).

But I think we’ve already established that I’m shit at guessing what’s going to happen (unless it’s about humans making stupid security decisions. Then I’m always right), so it shouldn’t have been that surprising when a message arrived from Tapan’s collective. It was addressed to “Security Consultant Eden, c/o Art or current captain of Perihelion ,” and it came through the wormhole on one of the regular messenger buoys with a bunch of other newsbursts and public and private communications while ART was docked at the university port. 

I read the message, and ART politely pretended not to be snooping while kind of ruining the effect by looming over me in the feed. 

She wants me to go on a survey with them, I said when I’d finished, like ART hadn’t already processed the message four times over and started running possible outcome scenarios while I was still reading.

That would be inadvisable, ART said.

Why? I was actually surprised. ART was always trying to get me to do shit that I didn’t want to do. I thought it would be all over this.

You are currently contracted with the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland, it said, like I might have forgotten.

I’m on leave, I pointed out. We didn’t have a mission right now, and ART’s humans were all down on the planet doing whatever it was they did when they weren’t liberating colonies or spying on corporates or picking legal fights with bond companies or doing deep space mapping or teaching university students about deep space mapping (they were busy humans). That meant ART and I didn’t have anything to do until its next cargo run, which was scheduled to start in two cycles. 

A survey will take more than two cycles.

You can do a cargo run without me. I would be back from Tapan’s survey by the time ART’s humans were scheduled to leave for their next mission, and hey, wait a minute, when did I start thinking about this survey like I was actually going?

I would prefer not to, ART said. Your company is enjoyable.

I wasn’t going to acknowledge that. I would have to pretend to be an augmented human, I said. Tapan and Rami and Maro all think that’s what I am.

Tell them you are a SecUnit before accepting their offer of employment, ART suggested.

Query: diagnostic , I sent, which is machine language for “that idea is so fucking stupid that I think you might be malfunctioning.”

ART impatiently batted away my diagnostic request and said: It would remove the necessity of pretending to be an augmented human.

I can pass as human if I have to.

You dislike it.

So?

ART paused for dramatic effect (I know it’s for dramatic effect and not because it’s thinking because ART has enough processing power to think and be an asshole at the same time).

Your lack of self awareness occasionally becomes truly alarming, it said.

Whatever. If I tell them I’m a SecUnit they won’t want to hire me anymore.

That outcome would not be objectionable, ART said, like an asshole. But I believe you have misread the situation.

I didn’t think that I had. If I say no, they’re just going to hire some stupid human security consultant and go anyway, I said.

That is the most likely scenario, ART agreed. It is also not your concern. They are no longer your clients.

That was true. They weren’t my clients. But they used to be, and the thought of them going off by themselves to get chewed on by hostile fauna or whatever was doing funny things to my performance reliability.

I didn’t say that out loud, but ART knew I was thinking it anyway, because it’s a monster.

For a construct that claims to hate its function, you are remarkably dedicated to it. ART does this thing sometimes where it says something that sounds like a compliment but in such an obnoxious tone that it feels like an insult anyway.

Fuck off, ART.

You fuck off.

So, I decided to go on the survey.

ART sulked about that for a while, but it perked right up when I asked for its help with pretending to be an augmented human. I’d made Tapan and Rami and Maro think I was an augmented human before, but they’d been pretty busy trying not to get murdered and hadn’t been paying much attention to me. It would be different to be stuck in a small habitat with them for 83 cycles with minimal privacy and plenty of time for them to notice I never did any human things like eating and sleeping and expelling waste. 

ART got weirdly intense about solving this problem for me. I think it was bored. That’s one of the downsides of having such a huge brain, I guess: whenever it doesn’t have inconceivably massive chunks of astronomical data to chew on it starts going a little stir crazy. Turi told me one time that part of my job as the crew’s security consultant was to keep ART entertained so it didn’t do anything stupid (like picking up potentially murderous rogue constructs because it was bored during a cargo run). I wasn’t sure if they were joking about that or not (it wasn’t one of the official duties listed in my contract, and Pin-Lee always had a lot to say about me being asked to perform duties that weren’t in my contract), but if they weren’t joking then I think I was doing a pretty great job. ART spent over an hour on research and prep for me, which is a staggering amount of time for a bot with so much processing power, and when it was finished it proudly presented me with a box of Gross Augmented Human Stuff, or GAHS.

My GAHS included the following:

1. A bunch of packets of nutritionally balanced goop
2. A small, portable fluid pump and some tubes, similar to the ones used by humans with medical conditions that made them unable to ingest food normally
3. A data carrier, which wasn’t gross on its own, but was tainted by association with the other stuff.

When I asked ART what the fuck I was supposed to do with all that, it explained, in its most condescending “you’re just a dumb construct with too much human neural tissue to understand this” voice, that these items would both explain why I wasn’t eating and allow me to pretend to expel waste.

For the duration of the survey, I would go hide in the restroom once per cycle and run the fluid pump for a while (not connected to my nonexistent digestive system, of course) and then dump a packet of nutrition goop into the recycler to make the power usage and recycler content levels look right if anyone checked. ART thought that this routine would satisfy the humans and they wouldn’t look too closely at it, since apparently humans also think it’s gross to talk about expelling waste and rude to ask about other people’s digestive systems. (ART also thought that I should still join the humans during their meal times, since communally ingesting things was apparently an “important human social bonding ritual.” I thought that avoiding human social bonding rituals was pretty much the only perk of the whole GAHS situation).

The data carrier, ART told me, held a program that would update the habitat MedSystem’s protocols so that it wouldn’t lose its shit about repairing a construct and also wouldn’t tell anyone that that’s what I was. ART had also programmed it to tell me how a human would react to whatever injuries I had in this hypothetical scenario so that I could more effectively pretend that I didn’t have adjustable pain sensors and automatically sealing blood vessels. 

I was privately pretty sure this was overkill, and also felt kind of bad about overwriting a poor innocent MedSystem, but ART was insistent that I needed to have a way of getting repaired when I “inevitably sustained some catastrophic injury.” I thought that was an unfair assessment of my abilities as a security consultant. Who said I would even let my clients get into a situation where someone could be catastrophically injured?

Yeah, I know. I can’t believe the thought even crossed my mind.

The first week or so of the survey was okay. The scariest thing that happened in the first couple of cycles was when Tapan and Rami and Maro all saw me for the first time, waiting for them in the station mall before we boarded our transport. They ran up to me making a lot of loud, excited noises and waving their arms around and almost hugging me before they remembered not to (that was still in my contract). 

They calmed down a little when the rest of their collective caught up and started introducing everyone (I’d already downloaded all the survey personnel information, so they didn’t actually have to do that). They all wanted to talk at me about how glad they were to finally meet me and how grateful they were about me saving Tapan and Rami and Maro that one time and how they wouldn’t have been able to do this survey at all if I hadn’t helped them get their research back. It was a lot of happy and excited humans to deal with all at once, and I guess I looked uncomfortable enough that Tapan eventually made them stop.

Then they all had to say goodbye to each other, which took a long time because there were a lot of them and I guess they actually liked each other, because they seemed really sad about splitting up for an 83-cycle survey. There was a lot of hugging, so I kept my distance in case I got caught in the crossfire and monitored the transport to make sure it didn’t leave without us while I waited for them to finish.

After a while Rami extracted terself from the hugging and came over to me.

“Good luck out there,” te said. Te was one of the adults in the collective who was going to stay behind on the station with the adolescents who couldn’t come on the survey. “Take good care of them, and yourself.”

I could do at least one of those things. “I will,” I said.

It took an objective 6.8 more minutes and a subjective eternity for the humans to finish saving goodbye to each other, but they eventually sorted themselves out into two groups, one of them staying behind on the station and the rest of us heading over to the transit ring to board the transport that would take us to the survey planet. 

As of that moment I had ten new clients, and right now that was stressing me the hell out because they were wandering all over the place. We were theoretically heading towards our transport, but they were all carrying a lot of stuff and kept stopping to adjust their bags, or speeding up and slowing down unpredictably to get around the crowds or because they got distracted by signs and pop-up advertisements in the feed. Tapan and Rami and Maro had seemed soft and fluffy and vulnerable when I’d first met them on RaviHyral. The rest of their collective was just as bad, if not worse, and threat assessment was shitting itself over having them all meandering around out in the open in the crowded transit ring like this.

One of them (feed ID Citra, they/them) who was carrying a particularly huge bag (why do humans need so much stuff? I had a bag too as part of my augmented human disguise, but I was starting to think it was too small to be realistic with how much my clients were bringing) kept falling behind and making my risk assessment spike. I finally got sick of it and dropped back to the back of the group, where they were trying to shift their huge bag to their other shoulder but ended up dropping it on the ground because it was too heavy. I got there just as they were trying to lift it again and I picked up the bag instead (wow, what the hell was in there?) and put it over my shoulder. 

“Oh, thanks, I appreciate-” Citra started saying, then looked up at me and stopped. Their eyes got really big. “Oh, it’s you! Hi, Eden. Can I call you Eden? Or Security Consultant Eden?”

“Eden’s fine,” I said.

“Okay. Thanks, Eden,” they said. “I knew I brought too much stuff, but I’ve never been on a planetary survey before and I just kept thinking of more things we might need, and my bag just kept getting heavier and heavier! You must be really strong.” They stopped talking, their face getting weirdly pink.

“You should stay with the group,” I told them. 

“I will! Definitely. Yes.” Citra nodded a bunch, then started walking fast to catch up with the others. (Off to a great start there, Murderbot. Ten minutes in and I’m already scaring the clients). I followed them, doing a quick headcount using the transit ring’s security cameras to make sure we hadn’t lost anyone.

We eventually made it to the transport without losing track of any clients, and my performance reliability jumped up a few percentage points as soon as the transport doors shut behind us. I went straight to my bunk and shut the door behind me, pinging the bot pilot as we uncoupled from the dock and started drifting away from the station. It was friendly, and happily traded a packet of my media files for access to its onboard security cameras. 

I used those to check on my clients, who were all wandering around getting their bunks set up and putting their stuff away. All except Tapan, who was coming towards my room. Shit. I thought about locking the door and pretending to be asleep, but I was a professional fucking security consultant and she was my client and I couldn’t protect her without ever talking to her. (That’s what I keep reminding myself, anway). I resisted the urge to hide and instead opened the door when she knocked. She stepped into the doorway and smiled at me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“I just wanted to check and see if you were settling in okay,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Okay! That’s good. Just let me know if you need anything.”

“Okay.”

I thought the conversation was over then, but she didn’t leave, just kept standing there in my doorway. Was she waiting for me to say something else? What else was I supposed to say? I started checking through my media archives for similar conversations (I don’t know why I even try that anymore, it never helps), then she said:

“It’s really great to see you again, Eden.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, either. I guess I must have looked confused, because she kept talking.

“I’ve thought about you sometimes, after RaviHyral,” she said. “I mean, I guess I thought a lot about everything that happened there. It was all so awful and terrifying, except the parts when you were there. It was the most danger I’ve ever been in in my whole life and you still made me feel safe somehow. You always seemed so solid, like you always knew what you were doing and none of it scared you. But…” she hesitated. “I don’t know. Sometimes you seemed kind of lost, too? I guess I just kept wondering where you’d gone, and hoping you were okay.” She paused and looked carefully at my face, which I kind of hated, and I had to stare at the wall behind her and pretend it wasn’t happening. “Are you? Okay, I mean.”

“Sure.” I said it because it was mostly true, and also because I was hoping it would make her stop staring at me.

She smiled. “I’m glad to hear it. Art said you two have been working together lately?”

Of course ART had been talking to her. I knew it had sent off my reply to their message for me, but it hadn’t said anything about continuing to swap messages after that. I should have known better than to assume it wouldn’t 

“ Perihelion ’s crew hired me as a security consultant,” I told her.

“I’m glad you two are still together,” she said. “Art seems great.”

“ART’s an asshole,” I said. Tapan laughed even though I wasn’t joking.

“Yeah, that too,” she said. “Some of my partners are assholes too, but I love them anyway.”

I was so horrified that I actually took a step back. “ART is not my partner.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed,” Tapan said, her face flushing. “You two just seem really close.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Oh deity, I’m so sorry, Eden, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” She looked like she felt really bad for making me feel bad, which made me feel bad for making her feel bad, and it was all just bad. “I’m messing this up, aren’t I? I just wanted you to know that I’m really glad you agreed to come on this survey with us. That’s all.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll just… leave you to it, then,” she said. “Sorry again. Bye.”

She left, looking kind of mortified (me too, Tapan), and this time when I shut the door I actually locked it. Then I curled up on my bunk and started an episode of Sanctuary Moon . I’d only had these clients for an hour and I was already losing my shit. I needed to get it together.

I felt calmer after a few episodes, and by the time we entered the wormhole I felt mostly normal. Then my internal alarm went off. It was a timer I’d set to remind me when it was time to do my GAHS, and it immediately ruined all the helpful calming things my media time had done for me. But I was going to have to start this eventually, so I got up out of my bunk, grabbed my GAHS bag, and headed for the restroom.

The transport had enough bunk rooms for everyone to have their own, but it didn’t have private restrooms (it wasn’t as nice as ART), so I had to go out into the hallway to get there, which was my first mistake. I was almost there when Citra appeared at the end of the hallway and started coming towards me. I thought about pretending I hadn’t seen them and locking myself in the bathroom before they could start talking to me, but I took too long to decide and they came over to me before I could hide.

“Hey, Eden,” Citra said. They looked kind of excited and kind of nervous. I didn’t take it personally. Even when people don’t know that I’m a terrifying murderbot I’m still kind of scary (Ratthi says I have an "outwardly intimidating disposition” and Amena says I have a “resting bitch face”). “We’re going to have some dinner, do you want to join us?” Citra asked. “Aja made curry, and there’s plenty.”

Ugh, here we go. “I can’t,” I said. They looked confused. I pulled the horrifyingly detailed description ART had written about my fictional digestive system out of my archive, then immediately closed it again. It was so gross I could barely even bring myself to read it, let alone say it out loud. 

“I can’t eat regular food because of my augments,” I said instead. I pointed at my GAHS bag. “I have to use a stomach pump.”

“Oh!” Citra looked like they were sorry they asked (that makes two of us). “Okay, sorry. I won’t keep you. You’re still welcome to join us when you’re done!”

I would not be doing that, but I lie a lot so I said: “Maybe.” Then I locked myself in the bathroom to pretend to put nutritional substances into my body and then pretend to expel them (humans are so disgusting).

I plugged my pump into the power source in the wall of the restroom and turned it on. It made a low, rhythmic humming noise, not loud enough that it would bother anyone in the rooms around me, but loud enough that any human who walked by outside the door would hear it and know what I was doing in here. For some reason that pissed me off. I knew that ART designed and built this pump specifically for me, and I was willing to bet all my hard currency cards (I have a lot now) that it had calibrated the noise level with as much precision as it did everything else. It had made sure that my clients would know that I was using the pump, because they had to believe that I was putting nutrition into my body in order to believe that I was an augmented human.

The worst part was, I was pretty sure it would work. (Why was that the worst part? Shouldn’t that be the best part? Pretending to be an augmented human had been my idea. ART had told me not to, because I didn’t like doing it. It might have been right, which just pissed me off more).

I kind of wanted to smash my stupid pump against the wall and never think about this again, but I didn’t. Instead I grabbed one of the packets of nutritional goop, ripped it open, and dumped the contents into the toilet. It fell into the water substitute with a gross, wet plop (it looked a lot like real human waste. Don’t ask me how I know what human waste looks like), and I flushed it down for the recycler to take care of. Then I sat down on the edge of the sink to wait: the pump was supposed to run for at least five minutes.

I was still pissed, so I put an episode of Sanctuary Moon on in the background to calm me down while I picked up the security camera feed in the ship’s eating area (why do humans need a specific room just for eating in?). Citra had come in and sat down between Tapan and another one of my clients (feed ID: Aja, he/him) while I was busy having emotions about my stupid GAHS, and now they were filling up a plate with food.

“Is Eden coming?” Another client (feed ID: Naji, she/her) asked from across the table. Her mouth was full and I almost dropped the input right then, but I had to know if my GAHS was convincing enough so I kept listening.

“No, it said it can’t eat our food,” Citra said.

 Naji swallowed before she started talking again, which was a big relief. “What? Why?”

“Because of its augments,” Tapan said. “It told me last time we met that it has a special diet. I wish you’d asked me before you invited it for dinner, Citra. It seems really private about that stuff.”

“Not that private,” Citra said. “It showed me its stomach pump.”

“It has a stomach pump?” Aja said. He sounded kind of intrigued, but also grossed out. I sympathized with at least one of those things.

“I was just trying to be friendly,” Citra said to Tapan. “It said it might come join us when it’s done in the bathroom.”

“I think I’d kill myself if I couldn’t eat curry anymore,” Aja said. I thought he probably didn’t mean that, but I upped the risk level on his client profile anyway.

Tapan smacked his shoulder (that made my risk assessment module unhappy too, but I told it to shut up because that didn’t count as an Inter-Client Physical Altercation). “Don’t be mean,” she said.

“I was joking!” Aja said.

“Well, it wasn’t funny,” Tapan told him. “Eden’s been through a lot. It doesn’t need to deal with stupid jokes too.”

“She’s right,” Naji said. “You shouldn’t be so insensitive about other people’s medical augments.”

“You’re the one who was just gossiping about its stomach pump!”

“I wasn’t gossiping!”

“You were one hundred percent-”

“Can we all stop talking about Eden’s stomach, please?” Tapan said and immediately became my favorite client on this survey (I didn’t have a list of favorite clients on this survey before, but I did now and she was at the top).

The others agreed not to talk about my apocryphal stomach anymore, so I stopped listening and focused on my episode of Sanctuary Moon until my stupid pump was done. Then I got up and went back to my bunk and ignored everything for a few hours.

As horrifying as that whole conversation had been, it at least seemed to have stopped the humans from inviting me to eat with them anymore. It didn’t stop them from talking to me, though. I’d planned on pretty much staying in my bunk for the whole trip through the wormhole (security situations don’t usually happen in wormholes unless the humans onboard decide to start trying to kill each other, which I didn’t think these ones would do), but it became obvious pretty quickly that these clients weren’t going to let me get away with that. 

ART’s humans and my clients from Preservation would usually leave me alone if I shut myself up in my room and ignored them, but these ones kept knocking on my door and talking to me. It was kind of exhausting. They wanted me to come hang out in the ship’s lounge area and tell them about my life since the last time we’d seen each other, or they wanted to tell me about their lives, or they wanted me to play games or watch media with them to pass the time in the wormhole. 

I absolutely did not want to tell them about my life and most of the games they liked were too easy to be interesting (I think that having a partially inorganic brain gives me an unfair advantage), but listening to them talk was okay (it sounded like they’d been doing pretty well since they got away from Tlacey), and watching media was even better because then I didn’t have to interact at all. They’d gotten really excited when I shared my serial collection with them, since I’d apparently had access to downloads that none of them had been able to find on the stations they’d visited. We ended up watching the new season of Drama Sun Islands together, which I’d picked up on my last cargo run with ART but wasn’t available in this part of the Corporation Rim yet. It was pretty good, and it had the great side effect of making the humans switch from asking me random questions about my life to asking my opinions about Drama Sun Islands , which were a lot easier to answer. 

With all of that going on, the trip through the wormhole went pretty fast, and then we were at the survey planet. My clients had contracted with a bond company for this survey (no, not that bond company. This one was called GeoSalas and was much smaller and shittier, which meant that their bonds were less expensive and they didn’t require SecUnits, but the equipment they provided was also a lot more likely to be broken, outdated, or missing. I guess my clients were okay with that trade off), so we got dropped off in a GeoSalas-provided shuttle at a habitat that they’d already set up for us before we arrived.

The first thing I did when we landed was cozy up to the habitat’s Hub and SecSystems. They were both very limited models, not much smarter than the average hauler bot (more evidence of a cheap and shitty bond company), but they were friendly and gave me administrator-level access privileges without much argument. There was a lot I could do with that (my clients were lucky I liked them), but all I did at first was suggest that SecSystem might want to shift its data storage over into the hopper’s memory banks. It said sure, why not (admin privileges are a magical thing) and made the change immediately.

No, I didn’t just feel like switching things up. This was a version of the same trick I used to do for clients I liked back when I worked for the company. SecSystem collected absurdly huge amounts of surveillance footage in the habitat, so it had absurdly huge amounts of data storage. The hopper didn’t. When SecSystem tried to store its files in the hopper, it would inevitably run out of space in the first few cycles. The rest of the surveillance footage would have nowhere to go and would be automatically deleted to make room for whatever the hopper actually needed its data storage space for. When GeoSalas came looking for their surveillance footage at the end of the survey, the memory banks would be empty and the whole thing would be written off as a system error. My clients would walk away without getting their data stolen again and, more importantly for me, the footage wouldn’t be reviewed by anyone who might actually know what a SecUnit looked like.

The other thing I did while my clients were busy unpacking and getting their living space set up in the habitat was sneak into the MedSystem to upload the new instructions ART had written for it. I still felt kind of bad about that, but the MedSystem didn’t seem upset, and I wasn’t really hurting it, just adding in a new module that would take over if it ever had to repair me. 

When I was done with that I went back to the bunk that was assigned to me and dropped off my bag of GAHS, then started making myself comfortable in the habitat’s security camera feeds. I’d gotten all my inputs neatly lined up and was checking in on my clients when I noticed Tapan, Aja, and Maro trying to set up some piece of equipment that I didn’t care enough to look up the name of. They were all cursing a lot and my risk assessment module was making noises about a potential Inter-Client Physical Altercation, which I thought was unlikely, but I got up to check on them anyway.

“Come on, you stupid piece of crap,” Tapan was growling at the equipment when I walked in. “Work. Work! You’d think that with what GeoSalas charged us for the bond on this survey they’d at least give us some half decent equipment.”

“Careful,” Maro said, scowling down at her toolkit. “They’re probably recording this.”

“Good!” Tapan made a rude hand gesture directly at the nearest camera, which freaked me out for a second because that’s the one I was watching through. “I hope those stupid cheap exploitative corrupt idiot corporates see this!”

“They won’t,” I said. All three of them jumped, and I made a note to include something about the importance of situational awareness in my security briefing.

“Yes, they will,” Aja told me when he stopped being shocked that I was standing in the doorway. “It’s data mining, all the bond companies do it. You can’t really get around it.”

I know what data mining is, asshole. “They won’t see this footage.”

Maro narrowed her eyes. “What are you-“

“Oh!” Tapan said suddenly. “Did you-” she stopped, glanced around like she thought there might be some corporate spyware in the room (there was, but I didn’t work for GeoSalas), then continued in a low voice: “Did you do something? Like in that cafe on RaviHyral, with the cameras?”

“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. Tapan and Maro’s eyes both got really big, and even Aja looked reluctantly impressed.

“That’s handy,” he said. “How did you do it?”

“GeoSalas needs better security systems,” I said.

Aja narrowed his eyes. “Are you a hacker or something?”

“Or something.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Leave it alone, Aja,” Tapan said. “It doesn’t matter how Eden did it, I’m just glad it did. I never liked the idea of having corporates looking over our shoulders while we’re working, especially after what Tlacey did.”

“Agreed,” Maro said. “It’s one less thing to worry about, anyway. Thanks, Eden.”

I never know what to do when humans thank me, so I just turned around and went to go look at the security ready room and see how cheap and shitty that equipment was.

Overall, it ended up being a lot like the other surveys I’d been on before, except that I got to watch media without hiding it and sit on furniture and tell humans not to be idiots whenever I wanted. I also didn’t have to monitor my clients when they were having sex with each other, which was great because these humans were all part of a collective marriage and were probably doing that a lot (I didn’t know for sure because I wasn’t contractually obligated to notice or care if they did). (Okay, so it was actually pretty different from the other surveys I’d been on). The humans also kept talking to me, which was weird but not as terrible as it sounds. 

They also talked about me sometimes. I tried not to listen when that happened because it was weird, but sometimes I did anyway to make sure that my augmented human disguise was holding up, and then I overheard things like my clients speculating about my tragic backstory.

“I bet it was on a corporate death squad.”

That was Naji’s theory. I was in my bunk, not in the habitat’s lounge with my clients, but I heard her anyway because I’d set a keyword alert on the habitat’s SecSystem. I wasn’t actually listening in on all of my clients’ conversations (ART thought that was a violation of their privacy (it’s a hypocrite) and I thought it was boring anyway), but the phrase “corporate death squad” had triggered an alert, I guess because it sounds threatening, so I reluctantly paused my episode of Timestream Defenders Orion and checked on the group of humans sitting around in the habitat’s lounge.

“No way,” Citra was saying. “It’s too nice.”

Aja made a gross snorting noise. “Have you even talked to it? It’s not nice.”

“It’s nice to me,” Citra said.

“I guess it likes you better than me, then,” Aja said. (He was right, I did. Citra was fourth in my new ranking of favorite clients on this survey, and Aja hadn’t even made the list).

“Seeming nice doesn’t disqualify a person from being on a corporate death squad,” Naji pointed out. “It could be both.”

“I don’t know, it's too… anti-corporate, I guess,” Citra said. “Have you seen its uniform?”

“No,” Aja said, “and why have you been staring at our security consultant’s uniform, Citra?”

“Shut up,” they said (their face had gotten weirdly pink, and I pinged HubSystem to ask if the temperature was fluctuating in the lounge area. It pinged me back and said no, and also asked why I had stopped the episode of Timestream Defenders Orion ). “It doesn’t have any logos on its clothes. It’s wearing the exact same survey uniform from GeoSalas that we all got, except for the logos. I think it must have somehow convinced the recycler to print it a version without them.”

(Citra was right, that’s exactly what I did).

“All that proves is that it’s picky about its clothes,” Naji said dubiously. “And anyway, even if you’re right and it is an anti-corporate, that still doesn’t prove it wasn’t on a death squad. Maybe it had a moral epiphany and escaped and now it can’t stand to even look at corporate logos because they remind it too much of its dark past.”

“You’re basically just writing your own entertainment media at this point,” Aja said.

“I just don’t believe that Eden would do anything like the things you hear about death squads doing,” Citra said, ignoring Aja. “It’s too kind.”

“ Kind? ” Aja spluttered. (I was tempted to add him to my list of favorite clients on this survey. At the bottom, but still. He was the only one saying anything that made sense in this bizarre fucking conversation).

“People can change a lot over time,” Naji said, ignoring him again. “Especially after traumatic events. Maybe Eden used to be a very different person, and its life experiences have made it who it is today.”

“Maybe something to do with all those augments,” Citra said thoughtfully. “You don’t get that many body parts replaced unless something seriously bad happens.”

“Tapan said it told her it was in an explosion,” Naji said. “That’s definitely something that could happen on a corporate death squad.”

“It’s also something that could happen in a mineshaft, or on a transport, or a power plant, or a civil war on some shitty freehold planet, or a million other places,” Aja said. “Seriously, what’s the point of speculating? You have basically nothing to go on. All we know about Eden is that it helped out Tapan and Rami and Maro with the thing on RaviHyral. That’s it. It could be anyone from anywhere.”

“That’s why we’re speculating,” Naji said. “If we don’t know anything, the options are endless.”

“And we do know some things,” Citra said. 

“Yeah? Like what?” Aja said. Citra opened their mouth, thought about it, then closed it again. “See? You can’t even come up with one thing! Being on a corporate death squad could be the least of it. I don’t know why I’m the only one who thinks that’s weird.”

“Ugh, not this again,” Naji said. “Look, you were outvoted about bringing a security consultant on the survey and I know that pisses you off, but it’s done now. Eden’s here. You could at least pretend to be okay with it.”

“You’re the one who thinks it’s a member of a death squad!”

“A former member of a death squad,” Naji said. “Reformed.”

“I don’t think it was on a death squad, for the record,” Citra said. “And I don’t have to know anything about Eden’s past to know that it’s a good person.”

“You’re just saying that because you think it’s cute,” Aja said, which was so horrifying that I involuntarily dropped the input, then immediately scrubbed the entire conversation from SecSystem’s recordings and deleted it from my memory archive for good measure.

…

What was I talking about, again?

HubSystem helpfully reminded me about Timestream Defenders Orion .

Oh, right. I unpaused my episode and got back to it.

I didn’t actually spend all of my time watching media, and my clients didn’t actually spend all of their time having bizarre conversations. What they mostly did was fly out to various assessment areas to test out their new strange synthetics detection system (the same one they’d been working on when Tlacey tried to kill them all. They’d finished it, and this whole survey was happening so they could test out their new tech). So I spent a lot of time standing around watching them do that and looking out for security threats. For 27 cycles, there weren’t any.

Then, on cycle 28, me and four of my clients went out to a new assessment area. This one was a lumpy field full of rocks covered in a thick, springy layer of moss. The moss was a lot of different colors mixed together in swirling patterns, and here and there you could see little patches of shiny, metallic looking rocks poking through. I saved a few images to show to ART later.

I was standing in the middle of the field, watching the humans wandering around with their hand-held scanners looking for strange synthetics. They didn’t seem to be finding anything, but I didn’t know if that was because there were no strange synthetics here or because their scanners didn’t work. Fortunately, it wasn’t my problem to figure out which it was. 

Currently, I had a much more annoying problem, which I pinged on the team feed.

What? Aja replied.

You’ve crossed the edge of the assessment area, I told him in my best being-polite-to-stupid-clients voice. Please turn back.

He made an annoyed noise that didn’t translate into the feed so he thought I couldn’t hear it. Joke’s on you, Aja. I hear everything.

There’s a promising formation two meters outside the edge of the extremely arbitrarily designated assessment area , he said. (Yes, he did put it in a different font for emphasis. I can’t make this shit up). I’m making an exception.

Like fuck you are, I said, and that’s when Citra started screaming and I started running.

So the thing is, we’d set the perimeter of the assessment area at 150 meters, and Aja was right: it was arbitrary. I’d wanted it to be smaller and my clients had wanted it to be bigger, so we’d compromised on something in the middle that none of us were happy about. But unlike my clients, I’d had an actual good reason for wanting the area to be smaller, and now I was paying for letting them win the argument, because 150 meters was just over the distance I could cover in the average amount of time it takes a human to die by accident. 

(Yes, that’s a real statistic. It’s in my company-provided education modules).

By the time I got to them, Citra was on the ground, screaming their head off while a medium-sized, six-legged, Awful Fucking Fauna (AFF) dragged them away by the ankle.

Get back to the hopper, I said on the team feed, ignoring the other humans who were yelling a lot, and sent an emergency alert to the rest of my clients back at the habitat. I did all that while getting my big projectile weapon off my back and blowing the AFF’s head off. 

Because nothing in my life could be easy, the AFF had brought friends, and they started making horrible shrieking noises. One of them jumped at me and I shot it out of the air, then got knocked on my ass by the other two. One of them started gnawing on my foot, which didn’t do a lot because that part of me was made of metal, so I let it keep doing that while I dealt with the one that was sitting on my chest trying to chew my face off. I grabbed it around the neck and got a great view of its three rows of spiky black teeth while it tried to twist out of my grip. Its breath smelled really bad.

My projectile weapon was on the ground a few feet away (I would have to run back my footage to figure out when that happened), so I popped open the energy weapon port in my right forearm and shot straight down the AFF’s throat. It shrieked and jumped off my chest, and I shot it again while it was trying to run away because fuck it.

The other one was still chewing on my ankle and had actually managed to get a few bits of metal loose, so I kicked it really hard with my other foot and then shot it in the face. 

I sat up. I was leaking from a few gashes in my chest where the AFF’s claws had dug in when it was sitting on me, but it wasn’t too bad, so I picked up my projectile weapon and limped over to Citra. 

The whole thing had only taken 21 seconds, so Citra was still screaming when I got to them even though nothing was chewing on them anymore. I sympathized. (Do I mean empathized? Note to self: ask ART what the difference is).

“It’s okay,” I told Citra. I pinged MedSystem for advice while I picked them up off the ground, and it told me they were in shock and losing blood from the wound in their ankle. No shit, MedSystem. 

“Oh, deity,” Citra sobbed. “Oh, shit, fuck, what the fuck was that. What the fuck was that.”

“Some Awful Fucking Fauna,” I told them, and they made a weird laugh/sob noise and hid their face in my shoulder, which got a lot of snot on my jacket, but I was willing to give them a pass for that because they were having a really bad day.

We’d been having this conversation while I was on my way back to the hopper. My drone (only one drone, because that was as many as the augmented human that I was pretending to be could handle, and because I’m a fucking idiot) pinged me when we were almost there to tell me that two of my other clients were about to get eaten.

Aja had been closest to the hopper and was already in there, but Tapan and Naji had been further away and weren’t back yet (humans are so fucking slow). They had also stopped coming closer, because more of the AFF had gotten between them and the hopper and were kind of herding them away, snarling and snapping at them every time they tried to move towards the hopper. Shit.

Aja, come take Citra, I said in the feed. I know, I know, I hate asking clients to help, but I’m just one murderbot and I can only be in one place at a time. 

I was already running, but I started going faster, and reached the hopper by the time Aja stepped down the ramp by the hatch.

“What do I-” he started saying, and I shoved Citra in his direction.

“Get them inside and get the hopper ready for takeoff,” I said, and then turned around to go get Tapan and Naji.

Get ready to run , I told them on the feed, and started shooting at the AFF. They were facing away from me but started turning around after four of them dropped dead with messy projectile holes in their horrible slimy bodies. I circled around them, trying to lead them away from the hopper, and that worked pretty well. They stopped paying attention to Tapan and Naji and started trying to eat me instead, which was better than what they were doing before but still wasn’t great.

Go now, I told Tapan and Naji, and kept a portion of my attention on watching them through my lonely drone as they started running towards the hopper. They were going to have to handle that on their own, though, because there were a lot of fauna trying to eat me.

I shot two more with my projectile weapon before they got near me and broke the neck of the first one that tried to jump on me. That made some of them back off, but the stupider ones kept coming, and there must have been a lot of stupid AFF because in about 4 seconds I was on the ground again. 

It was kind of like that time I got dogpiled by a bunch of alien-remnant contaminated humans who kept shooting me until I went offline. The individual AFF couldn’t do much damage alone, but with so many of them attacking me at once I was getting fucking shredded. There were so many claws and teeth coming at me from so many different directions that for a second I figured that I would probably just die. Then I checked my drone again and saw that Tapan had stopped running. Naji was going up the ramp into the hopper, but Tapan was hesitating at the bottom, turned in my direction and looking horrified.

Get in the hopper, I sent her. She jumped and her eyes got huge, and I realized that she’d thought I was already dead and she looked so upset about it that I couldn’t fucking stand it.

I’d lost my projectile weapon again, so I made do with my inbuilt energy weapons and my bare hands and in one (really gross) case my teeth, and managed to rip myself away from all the AFF. By this point I think even the really stupid ones weren’t that excited about attacking me anymore, so even though I was moving really slowly now (my leg was fucked) they didn’t chase me right away. 

I kind of limp/staggered towards the hopper, the Awful Fucking Fauna trailing behind me. Some of them had come away with chunks of my organic tissue in their Awful Fucking Mouths, so there were shredded strips of skin and frayed wires and popped plastic tubing hanging out of the holes they’d left in me and I was leaving a trail of blood and fluids on the lumpy moss. I hadn’t touched my pain sensors since I dialed them all the way down when the first AFF ripped into me, but I could still feel things shifting around in my internal structures that really weren’t supposed to move (I think some of them were trying to become external structures).

I managed to reach the hopper without losing any more chunks. Tapan had done what I said (she was consistently securing her place as my favorite client on this survey) and gotten inside, which meant that they could have all just left without me but hadn’t. I might need to have an emotion about that later.

I made it all the way up the ramp to the main hatch before my ankle gave up and I fell over halfway through the door. The AFF got excited about that and started running faster, and instead of wasting time getting up I just rolled over and started shooting at them from the floor. Tapan had been waiting for me just inside the hatch and grabbed me and started trying to pull me the rest of the way through, which only kind of worked because she was a smallish human and I was really heavy.

“Is everyone onboard?” Aja yelled from the hopper’s cockpit. He didn’t have a piloting certification so I didn’t feel great about him being up there, but I was too busy shooting AFF to tell him that. Hopefully the autopilot could handle it.

“Yes, we’re all here, for fucks sake go go go!” Naji yelled (she was close enough to the hatch to see that the AFF were almost up the ramp into the hopper and was understandably losing her shit about it). 

Up in the cockpit, Aja (or more likely the autopilot) got us off the ground and the hatch slammed shut just as the last of the AFF leapt at the doorway. That was great timing and I would have been pretty happy about it, except that my leg was outside the hatch when it closed. Now it was still outside the hatch, but the rest of me was inside and not attached to it anymore.

Naji ran up to the front of the hopper, probably to take the controls away from Aja, and Tapan dropped down to the floor next to me, staring at the shredded front of my jacket with all the blood and fluids and pieces of me dangling out.

“Are you alright?” she asked. Humans are always asking stupid questions like that. “You’re bleeding, here, let me get a medpack - where are you hurt the worst?”

“Um,” I said, which was unhelpful, but I was using up a lot of processing power trying to convince my stupid eyeballs to look at something other than the place where what was left of my knee joint vanished into the seam between the shuttle door and the wall.

Tapan followed my gaze. It took her human brain a few seconds to figure out what she was looking at, and then she gasped and dropped the medpack, which was counterproductive, and covered her mouth with her hands instead.

“Oh, deity,” she whispered, and stared at my leg for a while longer, then abruptly turned around and screamed: “Aja! Aja, open the hatch, right now!”

That was a really bad idea, so I was surprised that Aja didn’t do it immediately.

“What?” His voice came from up at the front of the ship, just out of sight, but started coming closer. “Which door?”

“This door!”

“The main hatch? We’re three hundred meters up, Tapan, why would-”

Aja came around the corner and looked down at me and Tapan and my half of a leg sitting on the floor, and all the color drained out of his face, which was something I thought only happened in the media. 

“Oh. Oh, shit, did I- Oh, deity, Eden, I’m so sorry, I didn’t-”

“Just shut up and open the door!” Tapan interrupted.

“Do not open the fucking door,” I said, and wow, that did not sound calm.

Tapan stared at me, her eyes huge.

“Eden’s right, we can’t open the hatch while we’re in the air,” Aja said nervously. “We’re still an hour out from the habitat. Eden, are you- um. Can you… wait that long?”

What the fuck else was I supposed to do? My half-a-leg was stuck in a door. 

I was thinking about whether or not I should say that out loud and wasn’t sure what my face was doing in the meantime, but it must have been something because Tapan grabbed my hand.

“Okay. It’s okay, it’s going to be fine,” she said. “Just stay still for now, okay? We’ll get you to the MedSystem and it’ll be fine. Just stay calm.”

“You stay calm.” (I know, I know. I had a lot on my mind, okay).

“We’ll both stay calm,” she agreed. “Aja, get the medpack open.”

He dropped to the floor next to us and started fighting with the packaging, which was stupid because it was designed to be opened quickly by humans in an emergency, but eventually he got it open and handed it to Tapan.

She wavered for a moment, indecisive. The half-a-leg situation was the most obvious of my problems, but it also wasn’t really bleeding a lot because it was mostly inorganics down there, so after a moment she picked the most dramatic looking hole in my torso and stuck the medpack to it. It beeped, sounding a little alarmed, and immediately injected me with something. I pinged it with the bot equivalent of hey, what the fuck was that , and it told me it was a pain reliever. That wouldn’t do anything for me because my systems would just filter the chemicals out, but I still appreciated the thought.

Actually, some pain relievers sounded pretty good right now. I didn’t really want to look at my performance reliability, but my hold on my pain sensors was starting to slip and I did not feel great. When I tentatively poked at them, trying to dial them back down, they abruptly gave up and wow, okay. Now I felt a lot worse.

It was bad enough that I had to fall over a little. I was already sitting down so it wasn’t that dramatic, I just kind of leaned sideways and kept leaning until my head was pressed against the cool metal floor of the shuttle. That felt nice.

“Eden?” Tapan said. She sounded worried. “How are you doing?”

“This unit is-” I stomped on my stupid buffer before it could say anything incriminating, but I’d been too slow.

“What is it?” Tapan asked. She was leaning over me to look at my face (I wasn’t a fan of that) and her forehead was wrinkled up. “What about a unit?”

“Never mind,” I said.

Aja, who had been running around trying to find another medpack, came back to tell Tapan that there weren’t any more, which I could have told him (and did tell him, actually. It was in my security briefing at the beginning of the survey. There were two medpacks in the emergency supplies stored in the hopper, and one of them was already stuck to me. The other one was on Citra’s leg). Tapan said some words that weren’t in my lexicon, then asked him:

“How far are we from the habitat?”

“56 minutes,” Aja said.

Tapan took a deep breath. Then she took another one, because I guess the first one wasn’t deep enough or something. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, that’s fine. It’s going to be fine. Just hang in there, Eden. We’re almost there.”

That was a stupid thing to lie about since I was right here when Aja said how far away we actually were. I didn’t say that though. I didn’t really want to say anything at the moment, so I just tapped her feed in acknowledgement and let my eyes close.

Tapan didn’t really like that. She started saying my name a lot, progressively louder when I didn’t respond, and I felt kind of bad about ignoring her. I think I went offline for a while though, because the next thing I knew it was quiet again and things had moved around. 

There were some regular bandages taped to my wounds that the medpack didn’t cover, and someone had shifted me to lie in a more comfortable position than the way I’d originally slumped over. My head wasn’t on the floor anymore and was resting on something warm and squishy instead, which confused me for a minute until it occurred to me to look at the hopper’s security camera feed. It turned out that the warm squishy thing was Tapan’s lap, and wow, no wonder she sounded so worried. I looked terrible.

I felt pretty terrible, too. My performance reliability wasn’t high enough for me to start screaming, which was good because that probably would have alarmed the humans, but I kind of wanted to anyway. I tried dialing down my pain sensors again but I hurt so much that it was distracting me and it took a long time to find the right input. When I finally found it my pain sensors still wouldn’t budge, and I think if I’d been a human this would have been the moment when I started panicking and flailing and sobbing (SecUnits don’t do stuff like that, except maybe the panicking).

The medpack made a worried beeping noise and injected me with more painkillers. I really needed to tell it to stop doing that. I tried to ping it but couldn’t find that function, either: I fumbled around for a few seconds, and while I was doing that Aja came walking back up from the front of the hopper.

“We’re 15 minutes out,” he said. “I contacted the others back at the habitat, they’re getting the MedSystem prepped. They’ll be ready when we get there.” He hesitated, glancing between me and Tapan. “How’s it doing?”

“How do you think,” Tapan snapped. Her voice was quiet but she sounded really angry, and I started running back the security footage to see if they’d had an argument while I was offline. Aja flinched.

“Tapan,” Citra said softly.

“What?”

“It was an accident,” they said.

“It was,” Aja agreed hurriedly. “I swear it was, Tapan, you know I would never- I didn’t mean to-” Tapan glared at him in a way that was apparently so scary that he stopped talking for a minute. Then he said, in a smaller voice: “Everything was happening so fast. Those things were running right at us and everyone was yelling at me to take off, and I couldn’t see what was happening back here from up in the cockpit but Naji said everyone was onboard so I just…”

“You shut the hatch without checking,” Tapan said flatly. “You hit the manual override, knowing that that would make the hatch close even if something was blocking it.”

I wasn’t sure why she was explaining what the manual override did, since we all had the same training module on how to use the hopper’s emergency features. Maybe she thought Aja had forgotten, or hadn’t been paying attention to the module. That made sense. He apparently hadn’t listened to my security briefing either. Not that I was mad about it or anything.

“I thought everyone was already inside,” Aja said quietly, staring down at his feet. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not the one you need to apologize to,” Tapan said, and then they all looked at me, which was made my already abysmal performance reliability drop another 2.4%.

“I will,” Aja promised. “I’ll apologize to Eden as soon as it’s better. I mean, if it-”

Tapan did the glare again and Aja shut up. “It’s going to get better,” she said, like she was trying to sound confident but not quite getting it right. “It’s going to be fine. It’s survived a lot worse than this.”

I had, but she didn’t know that.

Aja started apologizing some more, but Tapan didn’t really seem to be listening, and neither was I. My performance reliability was dropping again, and I was pretty sure I was about to shut down again. That was fine. At least I wouldn’t have to listen to them all talking about me anymore.

System shutdown.

…

Restart.

I came back online again when they finally opened the hopper’s door and I got about a million system alerts at once about all the horrible things happening inside my knee joint. I kind of wanted to scream again. My clients were trying to pick me up and move me onto a waiting stretcher and it would have been really nice if those pain reliever drugs actually did something right about now.

“You’re really heavy,” Tapan huffed from somewhere under my elbow. She and the other humans were really struggling to get me up off the floor.

“I have metal bones,” I told her. (Okay, so maybe the drugs were actually doing something. They clearly weren’t relieving pain though because holy shit).

She jumped and almost dropped me. I realized belatedly that she hadn’t noticed I was awake.

“Really?” she said, looking startled. “All of them?”

“No.” I think at least some of my internal structures are plastic.

They eventually did pick me up, though only after I managed to get my one remaining foot under me and help a little. Then we kind of awkwardly shuffled over to the stretcher and they got me up on it (the stretcher’s attached arms actually did most of the work, but humans like to feel included).

I pinged the habitat’s SecSystem since it had just occurred to me that I was in range again (get it together, Murderbot) and it helpfully suggested putting a security interdict on the habitat until I regained full functionality. I told it that was a great idea and then shut down again.

Chapter Text

When I came back online, I was lying on the habitat's MedSystem platform and Tapan was holding my hand. She gave me a wobbly smile when she saw that I was awake. Her eyes were red and puffy.

“Hey, Eden,” she said quietly. “How do you feel?”

“Okay,” I said. My pain sensors were finally tuned all the way down, so I mostly just felt numb. My performance reliability was shit, but steadily inching upwards as more systems started to come back online. “Did everyone make it back to the habitat?”

I fumbled around for an embarrassingly long time trying to find all my camera inputs again and do a headcount. I had my answer before Tapan finished replying anyway, but it was still nice to hear her say:

“Yes, everyone’s fine. You and Citra were the only ones injured, and the MedSystem already patched them up. You got us all back safe.”

“Okay.” I was staring up at the ceiling, and I had a camera in the room but I wasn’t using it, because I really, really didn’t want to look. 

(I also really, really didn’t want to think about that time I had a whole emotional collapse about a false memory of getting my leg chewed off, and how I had a real memory to match now. No, definitely not thinking about that. Not even a little.)

Tapan squeezed my hand.

“Eden, I’m so sorry about your leg,” she said quietly. 

“It’s fine.” 

I still wasn’t looking, but I could kind of see her out of the corner of my eye anyway, and saw her expression scrunch up.

“Your legs are already augments, right?” she asked tentatively, after a pause. “The MedSystem said your recovery would be quicker because of that, and you would be able to replace it more easily.”

“Yeah.” It was true: I didn’t have much organic material in my legs, and none at all in my feet. ART would probably be able to put together a replacement for me as soon as I got back.

Tapan nodded. “That’s good. But…” she sniffled, and I pinged MedSystem to ask if she was sick. It responded with an almost instantaneous no, which seemed overconfident to me. “I’m still sorry. You saved all our lives again. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened without you there, and I’m so grateful to you, Eden, but I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”

I didn’t know how to explain to her that that was the whole point of me.

“If it had to happen to someone, it’s better that it was me,” I offered. “At least I have experience with missing limbs.”

She made an alarming snort/laugh/sob noise and shook her head, using the hand that wasn’t holding onto me to wipe her leaking eyes. I tapped MedSystem again, asking for its opinion. It sent back: Diagnosis: emotional distress. Source: injured friend/coworker. Treatment: reassuring social contact.

Translation: she’s worried about you, idiot.

Oh.

If we were in a serial, this would be the moment when I would say something comforting and touching and profound, and then the sappy music would come on and we would hug and talk about how much we mattered to each other or whatever and then the credits would roll. There was a scene like that in episode 189 of Sanctuary Moon , when the colony solicitor’s bodyguard wakes up in the MedCenter after they drank poison that the solicitor’s secret evil clone sent to kill her and got put in a coma for four episodes.

If ART were here, it would tell me that humans need reassurance after traumatic events and that as Tapan’s security consultant it was my responsibility to provide it. It would probably even write me a script, the fucker.

But serials are unrealistic and ART wasn’t here to boss me around and my performance reliability seemed to have maxed out in the low sixties, so when I opened my mouth what actually came out was:

“I’m going back to sleep now.” What I was really going to do was close my eyes and watch Sanctuary Moon and pretend not to exist for a few hours, but Tapan still thought I was an augmented human and didn’t know that I didn’t sleep.

“Oh! Yes, of course,” Tapan said. “You should get some rest. Do you…” she hesitated. “Can I stay?”

I thought about it. Normally having a human watching me pretend to sleep would be a nightmare scenario, but having her here where I could see that she was safe and healthy and not lying dead in a ditch somewhere getting chewed on by hostile fauna was doing wonders for my performance reliability.

“If you want,” I said.

She gave me another wobbly smile and settled back into her chair, still holding onto my hand. I closed my eyes.

A couple hours later, Citra came into the infirmary. I still had my eyes closed but I watched them come in through the security feed and zoomed in as far as the shitty camera could manage (I miss my drones). They looked paler than normal and were walking slowly and carefully, but they weren’t limping and seemed like they’d pretty much recovered from getting chewed on. 

I guess Tapan didn’t agree with me though, because she stood up fast and made Citra take her chair.

“You really shouldn’t be up,” she said quietly when Citra was sitting down. She pulled over another chair and sat down next to them. “It’s late. I thought you were resting?”

“I was,” Citra said. They were both keeping their voices low because they thought I was asleep, but I could still hear them over the episode of Sanctuary Moon that I was watching in the feed. I thought about turning off my auditory inputs, but decided that would be too big a risk if there was a security situation in the habitat. “I just wanted to come check on Eden. Has it woken up at all?”

“Just for a few minutes, a couple hours ago,” Tapan said. “It seemed okay. It asked if everyone got back to the habitat safely.”

“Of course it did,” Citra sighed. Then they looked at Tapan with narrowed eyes. “A couple hours ago, you said? Have you been here this whole time?”

“Yes,” Tapan said defensively. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

“You need to sleep,” Citra said. “We’ve all had a really long day, Tapan. Why don’t you go get some rest?”

“I don’t want Eden to be alone if it wakes up again before I come back,” Tapan said. (I wouldn’t. I’d set a timer and wouldn’t “wake up” for another five hours at least).

“I’ll stay,” Citra offered.

“Come on, Citra, no,” Tapan protested. “If either of us should be resting it’s you.”

“I’ve been resting,” Citra said. “I’m awake now, and I don’t want to go back to bed.”

“Citra…”

“I’m fine! I wasn’t having nightmares or anything. I just…” they shrugged, not meeting Tapan’s worried gaze. “I wanted to know that Eden was okay, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Tapan said, then reached over and took my hand again. It was kind of hard not to twitch. “It did this for me one time. When I got hurt on RaviHyral. I was so confused when I woke up, and I was hurt, and I knew that I’d been in a really dangerous situation. I wasn’t scared, though, because the first thing I saw when I woke up was Eden. It was holding my hand, and I knew that everything was okay.”

Citra put their arm around Tapan’s shoulders and they started hugging each other, and my insides were doing that weird melty thing that happens when I’m having emotions and I really wanted to be somewhere else right now. I considered pretending to wake up just to get them to stop, but then they would probably start talking to me instead of each other and that would be even worse.

I watched a little more of my episode of Sanctuary Moon to calm down while they finished hugging. They were both sniffling and wiping their faces when they broke apart, but I focused really hard on my episode and pretended not to notice that. Then they were quiet for a few minutes, long enough that I got weirded out and checked the camera again to see what they were doing. 

Ugh, I shouldn’t have done that. They were looking at me. I double checked that my act-like-a-human code was still running and my breathing rate looked like a sleeping human, then back burnered the camera input so I wouldn’t have to watch them watching me.

“I didn’t realize how many augments it had,” Citra said eventually. 

“Me neither,” Tapan replied. “I knew it was a lot, but I hadn’t really seen them all before.” 

Right, so I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Mine had gotten torn up by the AFF and the MedSystem had gotten rid of the rest while it was doing repairs. There were a lot of bandages stuck to my chest and arms and there was a blanket over my lower half, but you could still see a lot of my torso, which meant that Tapan and Citra could tell that there was a lot of metal and synthetic material there. There were also a couple resupply leads attached to me, which actually weren’t just for show this time (I was low on fluids after all the leaking I’d been doing), so they could see my resupply ports too. I didn’t know what the ports on medical augments looked like, so I would just have to hope that mine looked enough like that to fool Tapan and Citra.

“What do you think they’re all for?” Citra asked. 

“I’m not sure. All I know is that Eden got them after it was injured in an explosion.” 

“If this is what it took to keep it alive, it must have been really badly hurt,” Citra said. “I didn’t know that people could even have this many augments.”

“Eden’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. I think it could survive anything.”

“Yeah, after what happened today I’m starting to think so too,” Citra said. They started biting their bottom lip, looking like they were thinking hard about something. “Have you ever seen anyone with weapons in their augments before?” they asked eventually.

Uh oh. I was really, really lucky that my clients had never interacted with SecUnits before, since I’d done a pretty shit job of hiding it during the whole fauna attack (I’d had other things to worry about, okay) and anyone who knew what they were looking for would have clocked me immediately. But I guess even clients as clueless as these ones couldn’t miss something as obvious as me shooting energy weapons out of my arms.

Tapan shook her head.

“I didn’t even know that Eden had them,” she said. “I never saw it use them last time we met.”

“Naji thinks it used to be in a corporate death squad,” Citra said, lowering her voice even more. “I thought it was far-fetched when she said it, but maybe…”

“Eden wouldn’t do that,” Tapan said immediately.

“That’s what I said, too,” Citra rushed to assure her. “But what else would it need in-built weapons for?”

“I don’t know, maybe for fighting off a million evil dog-things on an incompletely surveyed planet with a seriously fucked up ecosystem?” Tapan said sarcastically.

“That’s an edge case,” Citra said. “Getting energy weapons built into its arms implies regular use.”

“It’s a security consultant,” Tapan said. “A really good one. It must get into dangerous situations often enough that it needs to have a weapon with it all the time.”

“I guess,” Citra said, but didn’t look convinced. This really wasn’t looking good for my augmented human disguise. Time for drastic measures.

I went into my media archive and ran a search on things humans do when they’re about to wake up. It turned up a high percentage of results where characters woke up screaming from nightmares (usually sweaty and partially naked) and had to be comforted by romantic partners, which was really not what I was looking for. There was a pretty good selection of other results, though, so what I settled on doing was taking a deeper than normal breath, turning my head to the side, and shifting around a little without opening my eyes. 

It worked great. Tapan and Citra both froze and stopped talking immediately. They stayed quiet for a while, watching to see if I was going to do anything else. When I didn’t, Citra whispered:

“We should let it sleep. Go get some rest, Tapan. I’ll stay in case it wakes up.”

Tapan hesitated.

“Go on,” Citra urged her. “I’ll call you if anything happens, I promise.”

“Okay,” she agreed reluctantly. “If you’re sure you’ll be alright.”

“I’m sure,” Citra said.

 “I’ll come back in a couple hours.”

“Go get some rest,” Citra said, rolling their eyes. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“You’d better not,” Tapan said. She leaned over and kissed Citra’s cheek, then gave me one more anxious look before getting up and leaving the infirmary.

It took a lot of effort not to do one of those big, human sighs of relief.

My clients were arguing about me. I was monitoring the situation from the infirmary, where I was still sitting around pretending to be injured even though the MedSystem had pretty much finished my repairs (except for the whole half-a-leg situation) within a few hours of the humans bringing me in. It had been four cycles since then, and I was getting pretty tired of waiting. I guess my clients were too.

“We can’t ask it to stay here,” Tapan was saying. “Not after what happened.”

“I mean, we can,” Naji said reluctantly. “Eden’s condition is stable. It’s recovering, it won’t even need to stay at a MedCenter when it gets home-”

“It lost its fucking leg, Naji. Its internal organs were hanging out of its chest.”

“I know, and I feel terrible, but we can’t just cancel the whole survey because one person is injured,” Naji said. “Eden’s contract requires us to provide any necessary medical care, and of course we’ll do that, but we don’t have to abandon our work to take it to a MedCenter when it doesn’t even need-” 

“Forget about the fucking contract! It almost died!”

“But it didn’t,” Aja jumped in. “We’ve been working towards this survey for years, Tapan, and if we cut it short we might never be able to get the currency together to try again. We have to finish this. Eden’s just going to have to wait for the end of the survey.”

“And if those things attack us again?” Tapan asked. “What are we supposed to do then?”

Aja glanced at Naji, hesitating. 

“We know what to look for now,” she said after a moment, though she didn’t sound that sure about it. “We can avoid them.”

“What if we can’t?” Tapan said. “What if we’re out there running tests and we get attacked again and there’s nothing we can do about it because we decided it was fine to go running around an unknown planet without our security consultant?” (That was such a great point that I had an emotion about it. Pride? I think I was proud of her).

“We’re just going to have to take that risk,” Aja said, and that was about as much as I could take.

You are absolutely not doing that, I said on the team feed, and the group in the other room went quiet.

Hi, Eden, Naji said nervously. Have you, um. Have you been listening this whole-

Yes, I said. There’s still a security interdict on the habitat. You can’t go out again until I lift it.

“What the fuck is-” Aja started to say out loud, then remembered to switch over to the feed. What do you mean, there’s a security interdict?

You didn’t listen to my security briefing, did you, I said.

It’s our survey. We hired you, Aja said angrily. You can’t stop us from doing our work.

Sure I can, I said. 

Naji was pulling up the relevant section of my contract in the feed and sent it to the rest of the team. Eden’s right, she said reluctantly. Legally, it can prevent us from leaving the habitat if it determines that our lives are in danger. We all agreed to those terms. If we violate them we’ll be in breach of contract. Eden could sue.

Aja started saying a bunch of words that weren’t in my lexicon. I let him do that for a while, then said:

I’ll lift the interdict in 2.3 cycles.

Aja stopped abruptly, and I watched through the security cameras as Tapan and Naji exchanged glances.

Why 2.3 cycles? Naji asked.

That’s when the MedSystem is releasing me, I said. You can stay in the habitat until then. After that I can go with you while you continue your assessments.

There was a long pause, which freaked me out a little because I couldn’t tell what all the faces the humans were making at each other meant.

Eden, Tapan finally said, we all really appreciate that you’re willing to do that for us, but just because the MedSystem says you’ve recovered enough to go back to your own bunk doesn’t mean that you have to be ready to go back to work right away.

I wasn’t ready to go back to work right away, I said. It’s been four cycles.

“Oh, deity,” Naji said out loud.

You can’t walk, Eden, Tapan said, so gently. I don’t think it would be fair to ask you to do security for us right now.

I’ll be able to walk in 2.3 cycles , I said confidently. I could actually walk now, but ART’s special MedSystem protocols were telling me that an augmented human would need more recovery time than that. 

There were more mysterious glances exchanged between my clients, then Naji said:

We can put our field work on hold for two more cycles. We’ll decide what to do then.

Okay, Tapan said, and Aja nodded reluctantly. I tapped her feed in acknowledgement and then dropped out of the channel, though I kept hearing a few more snatches of conversation in the security camera feed (things like “-a little bit in denial-” and “-been through a very traumatic experience-” and “-just wants to keep us safe-”) before I dropped that input too.

So I had 2.3 more cycles to kill. I wouldn’t mind that usually (I’ve spend way longer than that watching serials before - my personal record is 23 cycles of nonstop media, when my transport crate had gotten lost on the way back from a contract and I’d been stuck sitting in there in the mailroom of some random transit ring while pissed off company equipment reclamation techs tried to figure out where the hell I’d ended up. That had been when I finished my first complete watch-through of Sanctuary Moon , and is probably my best memory from working for the company). But with a security interdict on the habitat and the humans getting antsy and annoyed and constantly checking on me to ask things like was I okay and did I need anything, I couldn’t really enjoy the downtime. 

My clients tried to keep themselves busy with science (they were using the unscheduled break in their survey to start analyzing the data they’d already collected), but even that wasn’t going super well. Apparently GeoSalas had (again) given them shitty tools to work with, including the software that they needed to process their data. I ended up having to filter out a lot of complaining about that just so that I could concentrate on my serials. 

Tapan and Naji were making it harder to ignore, though, because at the moment they were doing it in the infirmary with me. It was a weird place for them to work, since it was small and didn’t have that many chairs in it and there was a whole dedicated lounge area in the habitat for the humans to sit in. But when I pointed that out, they just said that they were comfortable where they were and they wanted to keep me company. 

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I had mostly been ignoring them and watching Timestream Defenders Orion . But the cursing about the shitty broken software and complaining about how they were going to have to do everything manually was getting louder, and I guess I had a lower tolerance for inactivity than I used to back when I regularly spent cycles at a time sitting in a transport crate, because I paused my episode and took a look at the data they were moaning about.

It didn’t look that bad to me, so I pulled it into my feed.

Tapan and Naji noticed me poking around.

“Um,” Naji said.

“Hey, Eden, what are you-” Tapan started to say. 

I ignored both of them and got the data formatted. Then I wrote a quick query, ran it, waited a few seconds because an augmented human wouldn’t have finished that fast, then pushed my results back into the team feed.

Tapan blinked a bunch and Naji squinted like humans do sometimes when they’re concentrating on reading something in the feed, even though their eyes have nothing to do with it.

“Holy shit,” Naji said. “Did you do that just now?”

Oops. I guess I hadn’t waited long enough.

“I have some spare processing space,” I said.

“Some spare-” Tapan sputtered. “Eden, that was faster than the actual data analysis software would have been.  You just saved us like ten hours of sorting through the world’s most boring spreadsheet."

“Deity, Eden, did you make graphs?” Naji asked wonderingly.

“That’s how my previous clients presented their data,” I said (by “previous clients” I meant Ratthi). “Is it okay?”

“Okay? This is fucking incredible. You’re getting a contributing credit on this paper when we publish,” Naji said fervently.

“I didn’t get one of those already for saving all your lives?”

Her eyes got really big. “Oh! Of course you should, I mean, obviously! I just didn’t think of it because contributing credits are usually for people like an academic advisor or a reference librarian who helped you out or someone who participated in the actual science- not that what you did is any less important! I didn’t mean to imply-”

“I was joking,” I told her. (Nobody can tell when I’m joking).

“Oh!” She let out a big breath. “Oh, right, sorry.”

“It’s okay. I have a bad sense of humor.”

She made a snorting noise and Tapan smiled. “No, no, it’s me,” she said. “I just don’t want you to feel like we don’t appreciate everything you’re doing for us.”

“It’s my job.”

“I think we can all agree that you go above and beyond.”

I didn’t know what to say to that (I really need to write myself a script for what to say when humans thank me for doing things), so I just asked: “Do you have any more data to process?”

They did, so I took a break from serials to make more graphs for them.

We kept doing that for a few more hours, then Tapan and Naji had to go eat. The first day I’d spent in the MedSystem, Tapan really hadn’t wanted to leave me alone, even when she needed to eat, so she’d tried to bring her food into the infirmary to sit there and eat with me. I’m not sure what kind of faces I was making, but I think she figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t a fan of the chewing noises. 

So, when Tapan and Naji finished working for the day they left me alone to go eat their food with the rest of the humans, and I got to go back to my serials.

I waited another cycle, then got too impatient and got out of the MedSystem bed. I did it in the middle of the planetary night cycle so that none of my clients would freak out about it, and also because I had a feeling I was about to look really stupid and didn’t want anyone to see.

I didn’t fall over straight away when I got off the platform, just kind of wobbled on my one foot for a second and had to grab the edge of the bed to keep my balance. The MedSystem beeped worriedly and reached for me with one of its arms, but I told it to fuck off and it did. 

I just stood there and wobbled for a minute, sorting through about a million system alerts saying things like, hey, did you know that there’s no leg where your leg is supposed to be? Why yes, thank you, I did know that.

When I’d finished dismissing all the alerts I headed for the recycler. It was on the other side of the habitat from the MedSystem and I had to hop all the way there on my one leg (yes, I looked really stupid, and I was really glad the humans were all asleep), which took a while, so while I was on my way over I pinged the recycler and told it what I wanted. By the time I got there, it was busily synthesizing my shiny new set of crutches.

The recycler beeped to let me know it was done, and I took the crutches out of its dispenser. They had loops at the top to stick my arms through and convenient spots for my elbows to lean while I held onto handles lower down, and they were just the right height for me because the MedSystem had thoughtfully sent my specs over to the recycler. I went ahead and leaned my weight on them and took a step.

It felt kind of weird and wobbly at first, and my hard-coded movement systems kept trying to move the leg that wasn’t there and throwing out error codes when it didn’t get a response. Every time that happened my systems automatically tried to reconnect with the limb (I can still move body parts that aren’t attached to me if I’m not too far away. The leg was probably still lying on a pile of moss in the assessment area getting chewed on by AFF and was definitely too far away), failed, sent me an alert about the failure, and then tried again. I got stuck in a stupid feedback loop of attempts and failures for a minute until I found the root of the cycle and shut down the whole process. 

Once I figured that out it wasn’t so bad. I got the hang of walking pretty fast, especially after the MedSystem dropped an instruction module in my feed, and it was already a lot better than the stupid hopping I’d been doing earlier. After a couple minutes of practice I was getting around the habitat almost as fast as I’d done before. I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near my top speed, which made me a little worried about going out on assessments with my clients again (maybe I could convince them to decrease the size of the assessment areas? They might be more receptive to my advice after almost getting eaten), but for just walking around they worked great. I could probably even shoot the energy weapons in my arms still, since the loops around my arms would keep me from losing the crutches if I let go of the handles.

I kept practicing for a while longer, then stopped by my bunk to change clothes. While I was in the MedSystem I’d been wearing some of the loose, comfortable clothes that humans like to wear when they sleep, but I wanted to switch back into the survey uniform. The recycler had made me a new shirt and jacket to replace the ones that had gotten shredded by AFF, and it had also printed out a special pair of pants with one of the legs cut short and sealed shut at the bottom so there wouldn’t be an empty leg flapping around while I walked. I thought it looked lopsided and weird, but my whole body looked kind of lopsided and weird right now so I would just have to deal.

When I was done with that I thought about going back to the infirmary, but I’d been in there for six cycles now and felt like a change of scenery (perks of going rogue: I don’t have to stare at the same wall for days on end if I don’t want to anymore), so I went and sat down in the lounge to watch media.

That’s where I was when the humans woke up at the start of the day cycle. Tapan went to check on me in the MedSystem first (that was her new morning routine) and panicked briefly when I wasn’t there. I felt kind of bad about that.

Calm down, I sent her over the feed before she could start yelling for her marital partners. I’m in the lounge.

Eden! Are you alright? What happened? She sent that while she was busy rushing out of the infirmary and over to the lounge where I was sitting, so I just waited for her to get there and answered out loud.

“Everything’s fine,” I said. “The MedSystem said I could go.”

She skidded to a stop inside the lounge, breathing fast. “Why didn’t you say anything? I could have come and helped you- how did you even get here?”

“I walked,” I said. 

She opened her mouth (presumably to ask me something like what the fuck are you talking about), then noticed my crutches leaning against the squishy couch I was sitting on and closed it again. She walked over slowly and sat down next to me.

“Sorry for freaking out,” she said after a few seconds.

“It’s okay.”

“I know you can take care of yourself. I guess I’m just scared still.”

“Fear is an artificial condition.”

She turned quickly to look at me, her mouth opening a little in surprise. “You remembered that?”

I nodded. I still wasn’t sure what the hell it meant, but I remembered it. 

She smiled. “That would make my moms happy. They gave good advice. Thanks for reminding me.”

Maro came into the lounge then, which saved me from having to come up with something else to say. She mumbled “good morning” to me and Tapan and was halfway through making herself a cup of hot liquid before she realized that I was there in the lounge instead of the infirmary (human brains are even slower than normal when they’re rebooting in the morning). Then she had to make a lot of excited noises at me, which got even worse when the rest of my clients started wandering into the lounge and joining in.

I put up with it for a few minutes (I was in a generous mood), then got up and went to hide in my bunk until they all calmed down. I could tell that Tapan and a few of the others were watching me really carefully when I left, but I ignored them and focused on looking like walking on crutches was super easy and I did it all the time. 

The did eventually calm down and sat around the big table in the lounge to eat their morning meal and drink hot liquids and talk about me. There was a lot of back and forth about whether or not me being able to walk around on crutches meant that it was okay for me to go out to an assessment area (the answer was yes), and whether they could convince me to let them go on an assessment without me (the answer was no), and whether that was a good idea even if I agreed to it (definitely no). 

All the questions they were discussing had really obvious answers, but it still took a lot more talking (and a lot more questions like was I sure I wanted to go, no seriously, was I really sure, like, really really sure) for them to finish debating. I didn’t pay that much attention to the conversation because they’d already made up their minds. They wanted to go out on more assessments and they knew it wasn’t safe to go without me. They just felt bad about it for some reason, so they had to talk around in circles for a while to make themselves feel better (don’t ask me, I don’t get it either). 

They did eventually agree to go out on another assessment, so the next cycle I was back in the hopper with Tapan, Aja, Naji, and Maro (Citra had decided to stay behind because of the whole fauna attack thing, which meant they were a lot smarter than my average client).

The flight was only going to be about twenty minutes this time, since the humans had wanted to stay closer to the habitat for now in case there were more fauna-related emergencies. Naji was in the cockpit monitoring the autopilot and Tapan was up there keeping her company. Maro and Aja were sitting together in the passenger area, Maro working in her feed and Aja pretending to do the same thing but actually glancing at me every ten seconds or so and chewing on his lip. I recognized that look, so I was sitting at the back of the hopper, watching Sanctuary Moon and waiting for him to either chicken out or come talk to me about whatever he was thinking about.

I was hoping for the first thing, but he went with the second (ugh) and got up about ten minutes into the flight to come sit next to me instead.

“Hi,” he said.

I did a big sigh (I can see why humans do that so much, it’s really satisfying) and paused my media. “What,” I said.

He swallowed. “Um. How’s it going.”

I didn’t have time for this. Well, technically I did (there were ten minutes left in the flight) but I wanted to get back to my episode as soon as possible. “That’s not what you wanted to say.”

“Ah, no, I guess it wasn’t.” He hesitated for a while longer (doesn’t he know that I have media to watch?) then said: “I wanted to apologize.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No, I do,” he insisted. “I fucked up really badly, and you got hurt because of it. I’m so sorry, Eden. I keep going over it in my head and I can’t believe how stupid I was. I should never have closed the hatch without checking that it was clear, it was so dangerous and I knew better. If I’d just taken a couple more seconds to make sure everyone was inside-”

I wanted him to stop talking, so I grabbed a clip from my memory archive and pushed it into his feed to autoplay. He jumped and made a surprised squeaking noise as in his feed, the AFF launched itself at the camera (in this case, my eyes), only for the view to be abruptly cut off by the hopper’s hatch slamming shut in the AFF’s face.

Aja watched the video for a few seconds, blinked a bunch, then asked: “Why are you showing me this?”

“Because you should see it.” Also because his surprised face had been pretty funny (okay so maybe I was still a little mad about him chopping my leg off with a door) but that was less important. “So you know how close we were.”

His forehead scrunched up as in the feed, the video looped back around to the beginning and the AFF leapt at the hatchway again. The door slammed shut with the AFF’s claws inches away from where Tapan stood next to me, and there was an audible thump as it instead slammed into the outside of the closed door.

I wasn’t sure if he got it or not, so I said: “If you’d taken a couple more seconds to make sure everyone was inside, it would have been too late. The fauna would have gotten into the hopper and people would have gotten hurt, or maybe died.”

He looked at me with his eyes all wide and hopeful. “So I did the right thing?”

He had, but I felt my face scrunch up at the thought of telling him that. “Just pay attention to the security briefing next time.”

“I will,” he promised. “I swear I will. And I am never going to vote against bringing a security consultant on a survey ever again.”

Well, at least one good thing had come out of that shitshow.

Tapan appeared at the front of the hopper. “We’re coming in for landing in a couple minutes,” she announced, then spotted Aja sitting next to me at the back and narrowed her eyes. She walked over to us and stopped in front of Aja with her arms crossed. “Is everything okay back here?” she asked me, glaring at him the whole time.

“Everything’s fine,” Aja said quickly. “We were just talking. Right, Eden?”

Tapan and Aja both looked at me. Tapan looked like she might do something bad to Aja if she didn’t like what she heard, and Aja looked like he knew it. Ugh. I guess it’s my responsibility as security consultant to rescue him or something.

“He was apologizing,” I said.

“Oh,” Tapan looked surprised. “Okay. Well. You should finish doing that. We’re almost at the assessment area.”

“He was finished,” I said. I could still get in a few more minutes of Sanctuary Moon if they left me alone now.

“Yep,” Aja agreed quickly. “All done. I’ll just… go now.” He escaped to go help Maro get their equipment prepared for when we landed, but Tapan stayed where she was.

“You’re sure everything’s okay?” Tapan asked me, frowning.

“I’m sure,” I said. She looked at me really carefully (I missed the humans who knew not to do that). I didn’t know what she was so worried about. She’d just seen me survive getting chewed on by a million awful fauna with big horrible teeth, she should know that Aja couldn’t do me any damage if he tried.

“Okay,” she said, then smiled at me and went back up to the cockpit, and I (finally) got to put Sanctuary Moon back on.

I was kind of on high alert the whole time we were out at the assessment area (okay, I’m kind of always on high alert, but especially this time) and the humans were all jumpy and nervous and stayed closer to the hopper than they usually did, but nothing really happened. The humans wandered around with their scanners while I paced and got my crutches stuck in piles of spongy moss, too busy scanning the area for threats to even watch media in the background. But there was no sign of any more AFF, and after a few hours we packed up the scanning equipment and headed back to the habitat.

The whole survey team was waiting for us when we got back and were way happier to see us than they should have been after we’d only been gone for a few hours (there was hugging involved, which I escaped by preemptively dropping the section of my contract banning hugs into the team feed every time someone got too close). I ended up hiding in my bunk while they were loud and excited in the lounge area and didn’t come out again until the next day, when we were supposed to go out to another assessment area. 

We kept doing that for the rest of the scheduled survey, and the closest we got to another hostile fauna situation was when Naji spotted a pack of AFF running around on the ground below us when we were flying over in the hopper. None of them ever tried attacking us again, and Maro told me that her theory was that we’d accidentally stumbled over a nest and the AFF got aggressive because they were defending their young. My theory was that the Awful Fucking Fauna got aggressive because they were Fucking Awful, but I didn’t tell her that.

When the scheduled departure date arrived, the GeoSalas shuttle shocked all of us by showing up on time and fully functional instead of broken and shitty like the rest of their equipment, and we made it up to the transport without any more emergencies. I wasn’t quite ready to call my clients completely safe yet (there was always a chance of horrible space monsters attacking us in the wormhole like in an adventure serial) (I didn’t actually think that would happen) (I wasn’t ready to rule it out though), but I did let myself relax a little once we were in the wormhole and my threat assessment module finally shut the fuck up for once.

The thing about my threat assessment module is that it doesn’t count awkward conversations as actual hazards, which I think is a major oversight. That meant that I didn’t get any warning when Citra came and sat next to me in the ship’s lounge.

“Hi,” they said. They were smiling at me. They did that a lot.

“Hi.”

“What’re you up to?”

“Watching media.”

“You do that a lot, huh?” Citra said.

“I guess so.” Compared to a human, maybe. Perks of never needing to sleep. 

Citra nodded. They kept fidgeting with their hands in their lap like they were nervous, and it was making me nervous too. I cycled through the security cameras in case I’d somehow missed something happening in one of the other areas of the ship, and when that didn’t turn up anything I gave them a quick, sideways look with my actual eyes. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Citra said, which even I could tell was a lie. “I just wanted to talk to you about something, if that’s okay?”

I don’t know why humans bother to ask permission to talk to me, since if they’re asking the question then that means they’re already doing it. “That’s fine.”

“Okay! Great. Um. Well, I wanted to say that I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you during this survey. Obviously it’s been a much more dangerous job than we expected and we’re really lucky that you were here to help us. But even besides being an amazing security consultant, I think you’re a really wonderful person, Eden. All of us do. So…” Citra took a deep breath. “I wanted to ask you if maybe, after this survey is over, you’d like to… stay?”

I was confused. “Stay where? On the station?”

“No, I mean with us.” Citra’s face was getting really red. “With our collective.”

“As your security consultant?”

“Well, that would be your job,” they said. “The same way that I’m a chemist, and I contribute my skills to the collective. But you’d be more than that, too.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t matter anyway. I already had a job with ART and its crew. “I have another commitment,” I said, which is what Mensah always tells people when she’s being invited to something she doesn’t want to go to.

“To Art?” Citra asked.

“Yeah.”

Citra nodded, biting their lip and looking down at their lap. “I understand,” they said.

I was glad at least one of us did. “You can still contact me if you’re going on another survey,” I said. “Or if you need a security consultant for something else.”

Citra smiled at me, though it looked more wobbly now. “Thanks, Eden. That’s really nice of you.”

“Not really. You’d still have to pay me.”

“Of course! I know you’re a professional,” Citra said. “But I hope that we can be your friends, too? Not just your clients?”

I didn’t know how to explain that being my client meant a lot more to me than it did to most humans, so I just said: “Sure.”

Citra practically beamed.

There were three cycles left in the wormhole. Three more cycles of awkward conversations, humans who looked me directly in the eyes, and GAHS. Three more cycles of pretending to be a human. 

I wasn’t sure I could make it.

My stupid pump was running again. I was sitting on the bathroom counter waiting for it to finish and wishing I was back onboard ART already. I’d gotten kind of used to the whole GAHS situation during the 83-cycle survey, and it was actually kind of nice to have at least a few minutes when it was guaranteed that my clients would all leave me alone. They kept talking to me, and looking at my eyes, and smiling at me, and offering to help me do things since I was still hopping around on my stupid crutches, and being nice to me, and calling me Eden. They kept treating me like a human.

It was pissing me off.

Yes, I know that’s a stupid thing to be pissed off about. I’d been trying to convince them this whole time that I’m a human, and being treated that way definitely beat being treated like an appliance. The thing about emotions, though, is that they don’t switch off just because they don’t make any sense. I hate that. (Bharadwaj told me that that’s a very human experience to have, which didn’t really make me feel any better). 

On an impulse, I tapped Tapan’s feed. She was in the ship’s common area with a few of my other clients, having a meal. I regretted sending the ping pretty much immediately and kind of hoped she would be too busy eating and not answer.

Hi, she replied, because the universe hates me. What’s up?

I realized too late that I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know what to say. I had to say something. 

I took too long, and on the security camera in the lounge I saw her frown.

Is everything okay?

Everything’s fine, I said, but I guess that wasn’t convincing because she frowned some more and stood up. She waved off Maro’s question and wandered away from the table, and for a minute I was worried she was about to come try to have a conversation with me in person, but she just went back to her own bunk.

Eden? she said.

That’s not really my name, I blurted. (Impulse control. I really need to code a patch for that).

Oh, she said. There was a pause, then she asked: What’s your real name?

Another long pause while I lost my shit a little (no fucking way was I telling her to call me Murderbot, but what else was there?), then:

It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me, she said.

I’ve lied to you a lot.

About what?

About me.

She was quiet for a while. I really wished I could see her, but there were no cameras in the private bunk areas and my sad lonely drone wasn’t inside with her.

That’s okay, she finally said. You’re honest about the things that matter. I trust you.

That was so stupid that I almost revised my designation of her as my favorite client on this survey. You can’t just randomly decide to trust people who lie to you, I said.

It’s not random, she said. It was hard to tell with humans on the feed, but she sounded like she might think that was funny. You’ve saved my life like five different times now. You’ve saved my family’s lives. That seems like a good reason to trust you.

You wouldn’t trust me if you knew me.

I do know you. At least, I know that you’re kind, and brave, and that bad things have happened to you but you still care about people anyway. I know that you’d do anything to keep us safe. That’s enough for me.

That didn’t make any sense. Humans didn’t make any sense. 

Eden? Are you still there?

Yes.

Are you okay?

I’m fine. I was confused. It was confusing.

Okay. You can always talk to me, you know. About whatever.

The timer on my stupid pump went off, which was the first useful thing it had ever done for me. I have to go, I said.

She tapped my feed in acknowledgement, then sent me a sigil of a heart that exploded into a bunch of smaller hearts. 

I dropped out of the channel and stared at the wall for a while. I didn’t think I was pissed off anymore, which was good, but I was having a different emotion instead, one that I didn’t want to think about too hard in case it made the warm melty feeling in my chest go away. Instead I packed up my GAHS, went back to my room, and flopped down on my bunk.

Three cycles to go. 

(I guess I could make it that long.)

I felt it the instant we came in range of the station feed. Actually, I didn’t feel the station feed, I felt ART, who was using it, and as soon as it noticed our transport coming in it was all over me. It felt kind of like getting buried under a pile of heavy blankets, except that sounds kind of alarming and this wasn’t. It was actually pretty nice.

Hi , I said.

I’ll begin synthesizing a replacement leg immediately, replied ART, who had already barged right into my diagnostics and started poking around.

“What is it?” Tapan asked me. I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I said:

“We just came in range of the station feed.”

“Oh,” she said, but was still looking at me weirdly - like she was surprised, but really pleased about something. “Are you glad to be back?”

It occurred to me that my face might be doing something, so I checked myself in the security camera and oh, yeah. It was doing something. I looked… happy.

“I’m talking to ART,” I said.

“Oh!” Now Tapan looked happy too. “Say hi for me.”

Hello, Tapan, ART said, butting into her feed. I’m glad you’ve all returned safely. I hope the survey was a success?

Hi, Art! Tapan said. Yes, our research went well, but…

She trailed off and glanced over at me like she thought I was going to finish the sentence for her, but I had no idea what she wanted.

Eden has already informed me of its injuries, ART said. The MedSystem onboard Perihelion is state of the art. It will be able to produce replacements for Eden’s augments.

That’s great! Tapan said. I’m glad you won’t have to go to the station’s MedCenter, treatment there is ridiculously overpriced.

And Perihelion ’s systems are superior anyway, ART said. Its bragging was somehow even worse when it was talking about itself in second person (do I mean third? Is fourth person an option?). Tell me more about your research. Were you able to locate the source of the error in case 328B in your initial test results?

They started talking about science and I stopped paying attention. I was still on the feed with them, but only halfway listening to them go back and forth as our transport drifted closer and closer to the port. It was weirdly relaxing.

After a few minutes, ART tapped me on a private channel, still talking to Tapan on the other one.

I’m glad you’re back, it said.

I thought about saying something sarcastic but couldn’t come up with anything, so in the end I just said: Me too.