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Chapter Text

“Wait! Don't touch it! You could break it!”

It was already too late. I felt the malware tear into my code the moment I picked up the hardware. It was too fast, wrapping around my systems. Something like sharp vines whipped through my code. The only thing I could do was grab onto its tail, follow whatever it was wherever it was going and stop it before it finished doing whatever it was going to. 

It was very distracting and I didn't know what my face was doing, but when I spoke again the student started to cry. “What is this doing here?” 

This kind of malware was bad (not that any other malware was good, [that is where the mal comes from, ART had once overexplained to me]). If something like this got into ART's systems, it could cause major complications and a possible shutdown. It had to be locked away and quarantined until it could be disposed of properly at the University. Which was the protocol when dealing with unknown tech. 

The student was still sobbing, “I was only studying it.”

Working with adolescents was… difficult. You could tell an adult human to fuck off and they probably would, but adolescents had soft emotions and cried a lot. The only adolescent humans I liked were Amena (her siblings) and Iris, but I didn't like seeing any of them cry. 

I tried to speak softer, but the malware was being tricky. “It needs to stay in the lockbox.” The student knew that. Why did they always make it difficult on me?

“Sorry, Security Ren,” the student sniffled, holding out a secure lockbox for the data drive. “I won't do it again.” 

I put the drive in the lock box, then took the box from the student. “No, you won't,” I agreed. They could get it back when ART landed at the University. Maybe.

I was taking it to one of the locked storage compartments when the malware tail slipped from me and I lost it for 0.5 seconds. When I found it again, it had embedded itself into one of my recent memory files.

I ran the file, trying to find a hold on the malware again, but it dissolved like static every time I reached for it. The memory was of ART. Something I had kept and tagged because it was funny and made me feel light when I played it. It wasn't anything important. I had no idea why the malware had attached itself there. 

I started the memory over in order to dive deeper and pull up the roots, but was hit with a sudden error message.

Memory file corrupted. Play will result in further system corruption. 

Delete [recommended]

Play anyway

> Cancel 

I exited out of the file and looked at it again. What had I been trying to access? I looked up my recent file search, but it didn't make sense. The corrupted file was apparently related to ART but I couldn't understand the tags. I tried playing it again, only to receive the same error message.

I moved on to the next most recently saved memory file tagged in the collection. It started playing: a pseudo argument we'd had over who the best was of our favorite Worldhoppers characters. Partway through the memory, it devolved into fuzzy purple and white static. The static had the vague shape of a star or a five-petal flower before the file glitched and the same error message from before blinked in harsh red letters.

“SecUn—um, Security Ren,” Iris’s voice surprised me and I exited out of my memory files. She was carrying several tablets for the students. They looked like they were about to topple over, but as I reached for them, something in my Threat Assessment went off. Not about the tablets. About me. “Are you okay?”

“I need to quarantine,” I told her. “I can't touch any of ART’s systems.”

“Why?” She sounded worried, "What's wrong?”

“I don't know,” I told her. I had learned to do that with Amena. It meant we both knew I was scared, too, and I hated it. “I'll figure it out.” I still had the lockbox in my hand and I knew that was bad. I had to put it somewhere safe. Somewhere it couldn't hurt anything. I didn't even know what it was.

I took it back to the small cabin ART had secured for me as my room. Really, it was a desensitization space, but it would work for quarantine. I put the lockbox on a tall shelf and sat down on the hammock in the corner. My body went weightless like it does in space and I stared up at the ceiling. 

Threat Assessment was telling me something was wrong. I knew that already. I needed to find out what it was. I only had one lead to go off of. I tried to access this mysterious “ART" in my files again, hoping maybe the tags would help me surmise what the memories were about, but every memory file was tagged as corrupted. On a whim, I played one anyway. It was less of a memory and more of the feeling of being blanked in the feed, smothered and hidden from view as my favorite episode of Sanctuary Moon played.

It felt… nice-in-a-weird-way. I didn't understand it. I didn't know where the memory had come from. A sudden surge of pain shot through my abdomen as my processors seized up for a moment. The nice feeling was replaced with pain and I quickly exited the memory as the purple and white static took over, the flower shape becoming more obvious. I wanted to delete it, but something was stopping me. I didn't know why I couldn't do it, but the feeling of letting anything to do with ART go made my organic parts quake.

I continued to search within ART's tag for any useful information about what I was actually looking for and what could be happening to my systems and processors. I found one file that had yet to be corrupted. It was an old file, dated before I rescued Dr. Mensah. It had been buried deep in my memory, almost completely hidden. I played it.

It was another feeling-memory. One of dread consuming my whole body. The memory file was only .00001 of a second long, but it told me everything I needed to know about the ship I was on: ART—Perihelion—whatever it was—was dangerous and I needed to stop it.

Chapter Text

“I really don't know,” Iris told Amina honestly. She was the first person Iris had thought of to call when Murderbot had locked itself away in its room. She was pretty sure it wasn't an emotional breakdown, but it was Murderbot's first school trip and those could do things even to a seasoned professor. “I might be making a bigger deal out of this than it is. SecUnit was just acting… weird.”

Iris gently dropped her arm full of tablets on the desk, sorting them by research topic,  then again alphabetically. In the video image on her feed, Amena flickered and lagged, the entire image glitching several times. Peri usually helped with keeping the connection stable, but it was currently having its attention split in several different directions and was too distracted for Iris to bring it up without feeling like she was just adding on one more thing. 

A moment later, her girlfriend was back with a nervous expression. “Weird for SecUnit? How could you tell?” The joke was made flat by the obvious concern in Amena's voice. 

“It said it needed to quarantine, then it locked itself in its room and completely disappeared from the feed.” Iris sighed and sat on the corner of the desk. She was in what counted as the teachers office. It was the closest thing to privacy available at the moment and she couldn't think with her hands still.

She grabbed a stack of paper assignments that had just been printed and started separating them for Peri to staple later. Usually, that was Peri's job, too, but it understood when Iris needed busy work. She stopped and stuck her head out of the office to glance down the corridor towards Murderbot's room. It hadn't been very long that it had locked itself away, but Iris was worried. She couldn't even use food as an excuse to go check on it.

“Maybe it just needs perimeter time,” Amena offered. It was a fair suggestion. Sometimes the old buffer would still come up when it was overwhelmed, but Murderbot had never used quarantine as an excuse before. That was disconcerting. 

“Maybe,” Iris agreed weakly. Neither of them were convinced that was what was happening and they were both doing a bad job hiding it. A burst of screams from another room caused Iris to jump and hit the doorfram, but it devolved into giggles before Iris could really be worried. 

“Why do humans quarantine,” Amena asked aloud, drawing Iris's attention back. She was thinking deeply about it. It was something Iris really admired about Amena—how much she thought of Murderbot as the person it was and showed it the same concern she would any other member of her family. As someone with a similar relationship to their sibling, it made Iris feel more connected to her. “SecUnits don't get sick. … Do they?”

It was a good question. One she didn't know the answer to. There weren't a lot of studies on the organic parts of SecUnits and theirs hadn't offered to let the University run any on it (for good reason). Iris hummed and shrugged. “It was worried about Peri and I know for certain it can't catch a cold.”

“Not a cold,” Amena agreed, humming. She gasped suddenly as a horrible thought dawned on her. “A virus!”

Fear and adrenaline shot through Iris and the papers in her hand crumbled slightly. There had been a lot of untested technology brought on board from the archeology site, but it was all supposed to be locked away in Faraday cages. “You think SecUnit has a… contagious computer virus? Inside one of the most advanced computers ever developed.” Horror rooted itself in the pit of Iris's stomach. “In the middle of deep space.” 

“Quarantine,” Amena suggested meekly. 

“Quarantine,” Iris agreed, rubbing her face. Her fingers were shaking. She took a deep breath and let it out, trying to calm her nerves. “SecUnit is a capable hacker,” which was an understatement, but one Murderbot was closer to agreeing with than ‘masterful hacker.’ “It should be fine. Right?”

The edges of Amena video feed were glitching with static again. The colors must have been pulled from somewhere in the room because instead of the typical grey-shade static, the pixelated cloud shared the same shades of pink as magnolia flowers. Iris tapped at her temple, hoping some percussive therapy would straighten the feed out. Another burst of pink static obscured Amena completely again before quieting down to just the edges. Iris hated the connection out in deep space.

“I know it's doing everything it can to keep you safe,” Amena said. Iris knew that, too. “I trust it.”

“Me, too.” She glanced down the corridor again. “I shouldn't distract it, but I wish I could do something to help.”

“Can you find out what the virus does? Where it came from?”

There was another burst of giggles from the student. Iris didn't think any of them would purposefully put everyone in danger, but there were a lot of too-smart kids with too-little supervision. “Yeah,” she sighed, “I think I can figure that part out.”

Chapter Text

I was trapped inside a box. It wasn't a bad box, as far as boxes went. I'd been in several that were far worse. For one thing, there were things in the box. A hammock. A large media display screen. I was also a thing in the box, but I didn't know how I got here. I was the only SecUnit in the box. I checked my feed for any missed pings. My feed access was shut down with a warning (one written in my own, private code) not to access it again until the threat had been eliminated. 

Oh, great. There was (apparently) a threat. They couldn't make it easy for old Murderbot, could they? Just once, I wanted to come out of a reboot without any of my humans being in danger. Except–I hadn't just come out of a reboot, because my battery was sitting where it usually did at just below 50% and my diagnostics claimed they hadn't been recalibrated in over a standard cycle. 

Then… What had I been doing? Why couldn't I remember what was happening to me? What was I doing here in—in? on?—on. What was I doing on— “Aah!” A burst of purple static clouded over my vision as my organic brain tried supplying a memory of how I got here… because it wasn't in my coded memory files. Or, it was, but I couldn't access any of it without the static taking over. 

Something was definitely wrong.

The static settled down when a knock sounded at the hatch built into the box wall. Was this the mysterious threat that needed to be eliminated? I tried to open the hatch door again, but it was still locked. I started rerouting power to my energy blasters to open it anyway, but a sudden glitch caused the fuse on my right arm to blow. “Shit,” I muttered, patting at the flaming wire. Piece of shit hardware (me). 

“SecUnit,” Iris asked from the other side of the door, “are you okay?”

My Risk Assessment dropped to a more manageable number. I knew Iris. She was one of my humans. Was she safe. Wasn't she? Was she injured? How had she gotten here? How… how did I know Iris? She was a client. But she wasn't. I tried pulling up the memory file of our first meeting, but it was strange and distorted, the visual image woven through with the purple static clouding the details of the uniform she wore. She had recognized me as if she had known me, despite it being our first interaction. That meant… something. An unsettling feeling–like I had started partway through a serial and didn't know any of the characters–washed over me. I didn't like it.

“SecUnit,” Iris asked again, “can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” I responded automatically. “The door won't open. Are you trapped?” Was she in a similar box as me with no way out? “I can't access my feed yet.”

“No, I'm okay. You're being quarantined,” she explained. She quickly added, “It was your idea, you told Peri not to let you out.”

A burst of pain shot through me at the name. Dispite my organic parts needing less oxygen, I gasped for air. “Iris,” I warned, trying to open the hatch again, “ART—Peri—is dangerous. You can't trust it. It couldn't…” it could do a lot of things.

“What?” There was almost a laugh in her voice, but there was nothing funny about this situation. “No, it's not. Peri isn't dangerous. Why would you say that?”

“It's a rogue MI—it controls everything on the ship!” I didn't like scaring humans unnecessarily, but she needed to understand the danger she was in. “It could open all the airlocks and let everyone be sucked outside!”

“It would never do that!” Iris sounded shocked and offended at the idea. “Peri would never hurt a student or crew member.”

“How do you know that,” I asked. How did Iris get here in the first place? I didn't want to believe she was part of the unknown threat, but nothing was adding up.

“I know Peri wouldn't,” Iris sounded certain. “You know Peri wouldn't.”

“I don't know that!” I didn't. Did I? “How can I trust a bot? One I've never even communicated with?”

“What? You've never commun… SecUnit, can you tell me what the virus is doing to you right now?”

“That's not important,” I told her. “Your safety—”

“I’m okay,” she promised, but she still didn't understand. “Everything is going to work out just fine.” It sounded like a lie humans told to other humans when they wanted them to stay calm. Why was she lying to me? I wasn't human. I could handle the truth of the situation. “We just need to get that virus out of you, okay? Please trust me that Peri is helping.”

The only reference I had for ART/Peri/Perihelion in my files made my entire body malfunction in fear. It didn't seem like a helpful bot. The idea of ART manipulating or hurting any of my humans while I was trapped helplessly in a box made my gun circuitry fizz and my fingers flex. “It's not okay,” I insisted, doing my best not to yell. Even through doors, humans could be sensitive. “You can't trust it, Iris. It could hurt the students—it could climb into your augments and hurt you.”

“It won't,” Iris promised through the door. She sounded certain. She was too calm. Why was she so calm? There were dozens of students on board a terrifying space ship with a literal mind of its own. Why were humans so stupid? “But that doesn't mean something else wouldn't try…”

“What?” I demanded. Was there something worse than the ship on the ship? Did Iris know what the threat I was supposed to eliminate was? I was trapped in a box with a misfiring processor and the only human who could help me… wasn't. It didn't make sense. 

“I have an idea,” Iris said, suddenly excited. “It's okay, SecUnit! Everything is going to be fine.”

It didn't sound so much like a lie when she said it this time, but I wasn't used to believing humans when they said that at all (and it didn't happen this time either). In my experience, adding humans only made the situation worse. Adding humans who had soft spots for bots…? I couldn't stop her from trying to get the big scary MI to help, but I could fix myself before it created an even worse situation for me. 

I let myself fall back into the hammock and got to work.