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I was alive. I know, it surprised me too. I was alive, awake, and conceivably myself.
I was not happy to hear my memory had been wiped (sue me), so I asked the crew to go through the events of the survey with me. It seemed like I had everything for the whole time period of our stay - multiple camera views, drone footage, scan data and most (but not quite all) of my downloaded media. I frowned. Not quite all was… a strange result.
The crew had taken to relaxing around me, wandering around the space and doing pointless tasks together, but Gurathin was apparently just as much of a loner up here as he’d been on-planet. It was easy to catch him away from the others.
“Why did you delete episodes 420 to 568 of Sanctuary Moon?” I asked, standing in the doorway to the room he was in. He visibly jumped, whipping his head around to stare at me. I checked his vitals and frowned habitually.
“Your vitals are significantly elevated and showing stress,” I said irritably. “My system should have alerted me.”
“I’m not in your system as a client anymore,” Gurathin pointed out, unfortunately correctly. I grumbled at that, manually re-adding him. I thought he’d looked strange since I woke up, his skin all mysteriously shiny with some kind of human liquid (gross) and unsteady on his feet.
“Why did you delete-“ I started again. He held up his hand.
“I didn’t delete them,” he said. “They had the least emotional metadata associated and I’d run out of storage space.” I sat there and stared at him for a full 7 seconds like an idiot.
“Storage space?” I asked. “How did you transfer me back into this unit?” Gurathin stayed silent, glancing around like he was suddenly noticing he was alone in the room with me. His heart rate ticked up slightly. I realized I had gotten well within the distance he normally kept from others and stepped back.
“I had assumed you’d created a secure net to shuttle files across,” I offered, as a way to get him talking. Gurathin winced.
“There’s no such thing as a secure network. Not here,” he said. The sentence was loaded with some kind of emotion I couldn’t parse from his suddenly blank face.
“Then how..?” Gurathin pulled his lips tight, and I suddenly started to wonder. SecUnits dream, we just don’t remember them afterward. Could I have dreamt up a whole ridiculous rescue attempt? The whole thing had been so unnecessarily dramatic, like one of my serials. Gurathin caught whatever expression I was making and closed his eyes for a long second.
“It’s not a trick,” he finally said. “This is- shit, okay.” He connected to the room’s HubSystem and launched what looked like a really nasty virus. The camera feed went out, and I begrudgingly switched back to my own eyes.
“Will you promise not to tell the others?” he said.
“No.”
He huffed a laugh.
“That’s fair, I suppose. I transferred you manually. Downloaded you to my implants and uploaded you by hardline.” I blinked at him.
“No, you did not.”
“You have tagged every single instance of me in your files as ‘disliked’,” he said, which sure sounded like he’d had my files in his head.
“How could that be possible?” I asked. He let his eyes roll back and flicked a finger in some kind of reflexive net command. Or, hang on, he’d done that at the survey HubSystem too, when he’d unlocked it for LeeBeeBee. Part of his security system?
“Scan me,” he said, and I did. His vitals were still slightly elevated, but otherwise nothing was out of the ordinary. Then something happened to my scan. The feed briefly glitched, then restarted.
“…What?” I asked. Gurathin had seven more augments than he’d had before.
“Augment shielding,” Gurathin said. “The newest toy of the company, at least when I was… here. Now there’s no way to know that I can carry 10 TB of data on me with only minor side effects, like crippling migraines and vomiting.” I scanned him again.
Indeed, about half of the new augments looked to be pure data storage. One of the others was some kind of medical augment attached to his liver, which I disregarded, and one of them seemed to be doing some kind of very low-resolution passive scan.
Gurathin noticed my focus, curled his shoulders in on himself beneath his oversized jacket. I reluctantly stopped scanning before I identified the last few augments (though it would serve him right for the whole eye contact thing earlier. Which I only knew about because he’d stolen my memories back. Fuck.)
”I’ve never seen a human agree to so many augments,” I said.
”Who said I agreed?” Gurathin said grimly. “I wouldn’t take my shield down here if the Rim didn’t already know about them.”
“No weapons? Comms?”
“Nothing that would be actively scanned for. The shielding is far from perfect, especially in the experimental model.”
“You stored me in an experimental storage augment?”
“No, I stored you in my well-tested confidential files augment. I hid you behind an experimental shielding augment.”
“Oh, that’s so much better,” I said facetiously.
“I could have just left you there,” Gurathin pointed out, and I flipped him off.
(The banter was working, though. He looked less like he was going to bolt. Or fall over.)
My sensors picked up that same strange shimmering glitch, and then Gurathin read as having his normal two augments - vision and imbedded net access.
“Huh,” I said. “Okay. Do you have any hard credit? On top of everything else about this shitty place, they charge per download and thanks to someone’s storage limit I have 148 new episodes to watch.”
I counted his tiny smile as a win.
It didn’t occur to me until I was on the bot transport heading away from the station that perhaps I should have told Mensah that Gurathin was heavily augmented in a way clearly intended to make him an effective Corporate spy. Whatever. If he’d ever been loyal to the company, he sure wasn’t now. Plus, it wasn’t like humans ever listened to my threat assessments anyway.