Work Text:
I was patrolling along ART’s central corridor, minding my own business and sorting through some media files, when one of my drones picked up unusual activity in the control room. Several of the humans—Martyn, Tarik, Kaede and Matteo—were speaking in hushed voices and taking turns guarding the doorway while the others gathered around a table.
Humans acting shifty is usually a precursor to humans needing to be rescued, so whatever they were doing, I wasn’t happy about it. The chances of Martyn being involved in anything that could endanger the crew were pretty low (12.6%—Seth’s the responsible one), and we were in a wormhole, so the options for causing chaos were limited to the inside of the ship. Still, I adjusted my route to figure out what they were up to and whether I could stop it.
I’m used to humans suddenly pretending like everything is normal and they weren’t doing anything suspicious when they see me, but Tarik waved me over urgently as soon as I rounded the corner. He looked quickly back and forth along the corridor, which was stupid because 1) as already mentioned, we were in a wormhole, so it’s not like we could have been boarded, and 2) obviously I would have picked up on any hostiles in the direction I’d just come from. I know I’m always complaining that humans shouldn’t do their own security, but I’d really expected better of Tarik. Anyway, there weren’t any dangers visible on ART’s cameras and my risk assessment was quiet, but I deployed a couple of drones to monitor the intersecting hallways anyway.
Tarik beckoned me again. ‘Psst, SecUnit. Come sign this.’
‘I’m not signing anything without my lawyer present,’ I said, which is what Pin-Lee had told me to say if anyone gave me another contract.
‘No, it’s just Iris’ birthday card.’ Kaede sidled up beside Tarik and took his place at the door. She pointed into the room, where Matteo was bent over a table and making unnecessary thinking noises.
It is not legally binding, ART informed me, amusement in its feed voice. I sent it a rude sigil.
Matteo finished writing and made space for me at the table. Iris’ card was made of delicate wood pulp, and the front had a picture of the Mihiran planetary system with the words “You’re out of these worlds!” on it. One of the crew had drawn a picture of ART zooming away from the planets, so I guess the joke kind of made sense.
I opened the card to look at the other signatures. ART’s greeting was already printed on the inside in its characteristic Perihelion blue, using a swirling font that emulated human handwriting. It was some sort of incomprehensible sibling in-joke about local fauna wearing hats. Kaede’s message referenced the nail grooming rituals she and Iris liked to do together, and Tarik had included some comments about how much he enjoyed working with Iris. Matteo had called Iris “old as meteors” which seemed kind of rude until I remembered that humans are weird and sometimes express affection by mocking each other.
If formulating a simple greeting is beyond your limited capabilities, I will be happy to update your drivers for you, offered ART smugly after I’d spent 3.5 seconds staring at the card in panic.
I’ll update your drivers, I threatened. Let me think.
Karime had just written “Happy birthday!” and signed her name. That was doable. I picked up the writing implement the humans had been using. The crew was good at not looking at me by now, but I could feel the prickle of their attention on me anyway.
‘I need to do a software update,’ I said, and walked out before anyone could say anything.
ART pinged me as I was heading back to my cabin at a normal speed well within the standard deviation for how fast I usually walk.
If you would like assistance with drafting a message for Iris, we can write one together. It sounded sincere this time, but that just annoyed me more.
‘I don’t need your help coming up with something to say,’ I snapped, not quite slamming the door behind me. ‘It’s just a stupid human birthday card.’
ART flickered the lights in my cabin in protest. You are not required to write a message. It is acceptable to simply sign your name.
‘I’m not required to do anything that isn’t in my contract, actually.’ I sat down heavily on the bed, which I could do because ART had built me a reinforced bunk after I tried the dramatic face-planting thing humans do in serials and broke the last one. ‘Iris will turn thirty whether I sign her card or not.’
It will make Iris happy if you sign it, retorted ART, a little coldly. It pulled away slightly from me in the feed. Anniversaries that are multiples of ten are especially meaningful to humans.
‘Can you just drop it?’ I pulled up an episode of World Hoppers in the hope that would distract ART. It was the one where the heavily augmented chief engineer lands on a planet without feed access and has to figure out alternative ways of communicating.
ART was quiet for 7.19 seconds. I could feel it brooding in the feed. Then it said: Are you unhappy you don’t have a birthday to celebrate?
My organics did something unpleasant. ‘Obviously not.’
You could choose a date yourself, continued ART, only a fraction of its enormous attention on the show I’d started. So much for distracting it. The date you hacked your governor module, maybe, or—its feed presence went sort of warm but also a bit evasive—perhaps the date you joined my crew?
‘I don’t want to celebrate a random date,’ I said. ‘Having a special day when everyone is supposed to talk to me sounds terrible.’
That’s how I thought you would feel about it, said ART, its emotions a little muted. But Iris will appreciate it if you acknowledge her special day. It paused for a calculated 2.04 seconds. As will I.
I groaned and pressed my face into the pillow. ‘Fine. How long do I have?’
ART stopped holding itself at a distance and leaned on me appreciatively. There will be a card and gift presentation in the crew lounge at 1400 hours tomorrow. Martyn has the card for safekeeping. It tapped the input where I was playing the show for both of us. Would you like to watch Sanctuary Moon instead?
‘No, this is good,’ I replied. I turned my physical body back over so I could breathe again and settled against it in the feed. There was a reason I’d picked this particular episode.
When the crew were all in their respective cabins for the next rest period, I headed down to the crew lounge. In addition to chairs of varying levels of comfiness and tables for eating and working at, there were several woven storage containers that held printed books, games and other items humans used for their leisure activities.
ART pinged me curiously. I ignored it as I rifled through the basket of paper craft supplies and writing implements, tore a few sheets of paper off a writing pad and sat down.
I stared at my tools for a moment and took a deep breath. I could do this. Human children could do this. I reached for the writing implement I had chosen and tried to grasp it the way I would hold the screwdriver in a field repair kit. It felt unfamiliar and wrong.
ART loomed into my feed. My offer to help you draft a message stands. This is something many humans also find challenging.
I dropped the writing implement. ‘Could you leave me alone for five whole minutes?’ This was hard enough without a smug know-it-all looking over my shoulder. ART pulled away, sulking.
Okay. I could do this.
I searched my media for scenes of humans writing, but it wasn’t very helpful. Most of the scenes focused on the text, not the way the characters held the writing implement, and a lot of the camera angles were weird anyway.
I had a better idea, and loaded up ART’s camera footage from last term’s students. That allowed me to zoom in on the weird pinching grip they used, and after a couple of tries I managed to more or less copy it.
Pulling video from ART’s archives had alerted it to what I was doing and I could feel it lurking in the feed even though I’d told it to fuck off. But I’d got this far and I didn’t want to give up now, so I pressed the inky end of the writing implement to the paper, and managed three jerky, jagged sort-of letters before realising the e was back-to-front.
Understanding and surprise bloomed through ART’s feed presence. SecUnit, it said, Can you not write?
I threw the pen across the room and walked out.
I am sorry, said ART, once it had let the rest of the five-minute timer lapse and I’d found a corner in one of the labs to sulk in. Most machine intelligences cannot write and it was not fair for me to assume that you could just because you have hands.
‘I’m not…’ There was a word for when you suck at reading and writing. Alliterate? Illiterate? I thought it was the second one, but I really didn’t want to guess wrong right now. ‘I can read.’
I know you can read, said ART. We read One Hundred Light-Years of Solitude together last week and your analysis was very insightful. And you are perfectly capable of creating and signing documents electronically. It paused. It never occurred to me that you might not be able to generate written messages in hardspace.
‘I didn’t say that, either.’ I opened a blank .notes file and input some text, turned my energy weapon to its lowest setting and pointed it at the bulkhead.
The beam flared and printed, in perfect Times New Romulan:
ART IS AN ASSHOLE
That’s a tautology, said ART. I knew it knew I would need to ask it to define that, so I didn’t.
A maintenance drone whirred down from the ceiling to take a closer look at the words now burned into its hull.
I had no idea your energy weapons could do such delicate work, said ART. You’re usually far less discriminating when destroying my walls and furnishings.
I pointed my arm at the wall again.
FUCK YOU
The maintenance bot extended an arm with a whirring abrasive pad and scrubbed the message off. Please do not swear on me, said ART primly. I am an educational environment that frequently transports impressionable young minds.
I snorted. ‘Yeah, and I’ve seen what those impressionable young minds write in your bathroom cubicles when they think no-one will catch them.’
(It was always fun to wait outside the toilets and scare students who, for some baffling reason, thought that was an appropriate place to record which of their fellow students they wanted to have sexual intercourse with (ugh). I’d written an algorithm that could identify when someone was defacing ART’s surfaces with 84% accuracy without needing to check any cameras; ART didn’t have any in the toilets anyway, but trust me, that’s one of the top two places you don’t want to have to monitor for human activities.)
Why not simply print your message on Iris’ card? asked ART.
My energy printing function wasn’t designed for the kind of flammable materials humans like to write on. I pulled my scrap of practice paper from the pocket I’d stuffed it in when I stormed out of the crew lounge and, without changing the settings on my energy weapon, incinerated it in a single blast.
I see.
I shrugged. ‘SecUnits are designed to take in proprietary information. The fewer ways we have of revealing it, the better.’
On contracts, SecUnits are only supposed to communicate verbally or in the feed, where the HubSystem can make sure clients can’t ignore it. Printing a warning message in hardspace was a last-ditch communication option for when things were already so fucked that the company wasn’t worried about causing additional minor property damage. There were other things a SecUnit might be ordered to mark with its energy weapons, like factory wall surfaces or cargo modules or human skin (have I mentioned already that the Corporation Rim is terrible?) but fortunately it’s usually cheaper to just get a human to do that.
We sat in silence for a bit, and I started clicking my gunport open and closed. It was vaguely satisfying. Then it occurred to me that I’d seen humans do something similar with their writing implements, so I stopped.
Writing is a complex biomechanical skill, said ART. It takes humans years to learn, but your hands are mostly inorganic. There may be a learning module that could speed up the process for constructs.
I pulled a face. One of the files I’d been required to carry around on jobs for the company was a catalogue listing all the extra features clients could pay for. Writing wasn’t an option for SecUnits, though there was an upgrade for ComfortUnits called LoveLetters™ that humans could use to force their sexbots to compose and hand-write messages of a sexual or romantic nature.
Yeah, I didn’t want that module.
ART didn’t insist, which probably meant it had pulled up the catalogue and seen the advert itself. I refuse to store a copy on my systems, but ART has a bunch of company documents it sometimes uses to check stuff about my configuration.
Some of my students use assistive devices to help them write. And many of them struggle to learn new alphabets, even if they are already proficient in writing their own.
‘I’m not one of your human students.’ I was getting tired of this conversation. ART was trying to find solutions to something that wasn’t a problem. Writing wasn’t part of my function and I couldn’t think of any situation I would need it other than for stupid human rituals like signing birthday cards.
ART sent me a reassuring ping. You do not need to sign the card, it said. But I do have an alternative suggestion.
ART made sure everyone got to the crew lounge in time for Iris’ celebration by making all the display surfaces flash obnoxiously five minutes beforehand and then pinging me every 0.001 seconds until I slunk into the crew lounge once everyone else was already there. All the humans sang a very bad song at Iris, who then made lots of happy noises when she opened her card. She didn’t draw attention to the fact that I hadn’t signed it, which is why she’s higher on my list of favourite humans than anyone else on ART’s crew.
Some of the crew gave her individual cards as well as the one that everyone except me had signed, which seemed superfluous, but Iris seemed happy about it. On top of that, there were gifts, including a new gaming interface from Seth and Martyn, a brightly coloured scarf from Karime, and expensive grooming supplies from Kaede and Turi. There was lots of hugging going on, so I made sure I was out of touching range just in case anyone got any ideas.
Before Matteo could hand over their present, ART, who is a traitor and an asshole, hovered one of its drones over to Iris. It held out a small wrapped package, and in the public feed where everyone could see, ART said: SecUnit and I made this together.
My performance reliability dropped 3%. I’m going to weld all your recyclers shut, I told it privately.
I said I didn’t have to give it to her in front of everyone, it retorted. Not that I wouldn’t.
ART has no idea how lucky it is that it doesn’t actually have a face for me to punch.
Iris remembered not to look at me, but she smiled at one of my drones and started opening the package. And suddenly, I was too nervous to watch and my performance reliability dropped another two points. The last thing I needed was to have an involuntary shutdown at Iris’ party and I was already standing next to the door, so I just left.
From outside, I heard the sound of paper tearing and Iris going, ‘Oh!’
I kept walking. My stats had stabilised, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at the inputs from the drone I’d left in the lounge; Iris was ART’s favourite human, and it felt really, really important that she was happy on her stupid arbitrary celebration day. That’s why I’d caved on making the gift with ART in the first place.
I dismissed ART’s pings until I’d done two circuits of the cargo deck and watched half an episode of Sanctuary Moon. When I did open up our connection again, ART’s feed presence was so giddy with positive emotions that it was kind of overwhelming.
She loves it, ART said, and attached a picture of Iris putting on her gift. She was in the middle of saying something to Seth, but I could tell she was smiling. I might have had a bit of an emotion about that.
ART wrapped itself around me in the feed, radiating contentment. Don’t worry. I told her I’d tell you and that she shouldn’t mention it.
That did help. My performance reliability ticked back up to normal levels, but I still didn’t quite trust my feed voice. ‘I wasn’t expecting it to matter so much to me.’
ART squeezed me. I will not ask you to sign any more cards or make any more presents, it said earnestly.
I finally opened up the input from my drone camera in the lounge. The crew were mostly eating cake now, and Iris was still wearing her gift and looking happy. Now that I knew it had worked out, I was glad we’d done it. My performance reliability was actually all the way up to 98%, which was higher than it had been before the whole incident had started.
I might learn how to sign my name after all, I told ART. Cards sound much less stressful than presents.
You have plenty of time, ART reassured me. Tarik’s birthday is next and I haven’t even decided if he’s getting a card.
I pinged back in amusement. I was definitely less worried about making sure Tarik had a good birthday.
Then ART sent me a mocked-up recycler design for a rubber stamp. Many human cultures use personal sigils instead of or in addition to written signatures. It can just be your name.
I considered that for a moment. A sigil felt a bit too much like a logo, but just my name (SecUnit, not my private one, obviously) would be fine. I changed the font (ART had picked the very recognisable lettering they use for legal documents in Sanctuary Moon, but I had a Preservation typeface that felt… I don’t know, more personal. Less formal, anyway.) and sent the design file back to ART. Yeah, that could work.
We watched the camera feed of the party together until people started to drift back to their duties. After that, I spent another hour patrolling the cargo deck, then made my way up through the education labs and operations level. Just as ART had promised, nobody mentioned the gift, not even Iris; when I passed her in the hallway, she sent me a friendly, neutral ping from her augments, the same kind she’d sent me plenty of times before.
But several times that day, my drone cameras caught Iris raising her hand to her throat and smiling, touching the necklace we’d given her. It was a simple chain bearing a small hexagon, made from the same material as ART’s hull, with her name embossed on it by my energy weapons.
And I kind of liked how that made me feel.