Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

[og image on tumblr]

the daisy-chained power strips generating
a newfound loneliness

»

In the future, when I look back at this moment, I know I will recognize the severity of the issue for what it is when it first comes to my attention. I will reflect, with embarrassment and no small amount of guilt, that had I known how far it would go and how drastic a measure it would eventually require, I would have treated the first sign with the attention and ruthlessness it, I will know, fully warranted.

In the moment, however, I couldn't care less. In the moment, SecUnit and I are watching The Improbables: Reimagined III, or rather, SecUnit is watching the compilation of fight scenes and cross-referencing their elements for possible incorporation into its own sequences, and I am just kind of along for the ride. It doesn't have to build its branching, tangling charts in our shared workspace, but I am fond of it for doing so anyway. I sit back and watch it work, watch its clever mind build connections that most wouldn't even know to look for, and nudge the boxes into better aligned positions, cleaning up the footage and crunching the metadata as I go.

I devote all of 22.6% of my spare attention to this, which could almost be interpreted as 'lazy', and in the privacy of my mind I could be pushed to admit that it is. But the students and most of the crew are down for a rest period, my navigation partition is taking care of keeping me perfectly steady in the rushing, blistering void of the wormhole, and so the most pressing task I have in my queue at the moment is to comb through my code for routine maintenance and act as a particularly annoying piece of graphic design software while SecUnit grumbles and swats at me for shifting half the elements three pixels to the left to bring them into alignment. (Hey, it has its entertainment — I have mine.)

Put it simply, I am content and relaxed, basking in SecUnit's company as I watch it brainstorm. So yes, perhaps I am feeling lazy.

This is highly ineffectual, SecUnit says, selecting a sequence and pulling it to the forefront. While most of the scenes in the compilation are supposed to have real stakes, the one in question depicts Captain Badass fighting xir young-sidekick-turned-enemy Bolt with an air that could be better described as 'reluctant' and entirely incongruent with the proclaimed animosity the two are supposed to feel towards each other by the end of Season 17.

I review the footage. I think it serves the purpose, I disagree, just not with subdual as the end goal.

Duh, through one of my cameras, I see SecUnit roll its eyes where they're just about visible above the blankets. Obviously they're not trying to kill each other. I'm just saying that xe would send a more effective message about getting him back on xir side if xe took it more seriously. It looks sloppy and undermines xir competence.

I pause for 0.68 seconds while I query my archives and return with a shortcut, clipping it onto the sequence, then sit back with anticipatory glee as I watch SecUnit access the file in my repository and review it.

Did you seriously just drop a citation, SecUnit rolls its eyes again, but I see it save the article. The (Mikkelsson XX25) tag remains in place, too, though SecUnit toggles the visibility on it.

Somewhere in the nebula of my educational modules, a standing ImpartKnowledge task sends back a completion ping, and for a moment the itch is quietened. Satisfied, I settle back, blanketing SecUnit and nuzzling up to it. It pushes back half-heartedly with an air of exasperation, but most of its focus is back on the project at hand, and I leave it be.

That's when I'm pinged with the report from the code crawlers. Something snags briefly on my attention as I'm reviewing it, a bug in a neat column of its siblings, just different enough to stand out in its disruption.

I may be a vast and immensely powerful MI, but even so (or perhaps, and especially so) I am not immune to finding artifacts in my functionality reports. Sometimes, something fails to get the grain of processing power it needs to complete the query in time and generates a jumble of recursive nonsense code as it stutters in place. I don't spare it another thought as I dismiss the error message and forward the report as reference for cleanup. It'll all be gone by the next cycle.

Speaking of cycles. T minus thirty, I remind SecUnit, highlighting the alarm clock prompt with the timer ticking down — I know it appreciates the heads up that humans are going to be up and about soon even if it doesn't need it.

Ugh, it says, and through the camera I see it hunker down deeper into its blankets. I like how it looks in blue. I'm not coming out until everyone is done being even more gross and gunky than baseline, it says, clinging jealously to its files.

Wouldn't dream of it, I reply and watch the crease between its eyebrows lighten a fraction, as if it genuinely expected me to argue. It is hopelessly endearing.

»»

"Be advised that the substance is highly corrosive and must not come in contact with any organic tissues."

"Y-yes. Thanks, Teach."

The lab is quiet save for the low hum of the fume hood as Ana painstakingly pipettes the hydrochloric acid from the glass bottle I'm holding into the vial, and I hold back my beep of acknowledgement lest it startles her.

(What are you up to? You're all— pointy, SecUnit asks where it's sprawled on the couch in the Argument Lounge. We've been working on improving the flow of its drones' flight patterns, and I watch it watch them draw lazy eights in the air above it, though part of its attention is now rifling through the cameras.

I hand it one of the corner inputs, far enough away from Ana that SecUnit doesn't suddenly find itself in close, if virtual, proximity. She's nervous. It's slightly uncomfortable to watch, I admit.

Acids are nothing, SecUnit muses after reviewing the footage and poking its nose into the lab report Ana has been filling out. Now bases, that's where the real fun begins. Once you get the feel of lico— liquefacultive—

Liquefactive necrosis; also, shut up, I say quickly and backburner the connection before the feedback loop makes me too nervous to be of use to Ana.)

Ana is an older student, having only just made it onto the roster with her much younger cohort as the result of what I found out to be eight separate attempts to be admitted into the program. When I hacked the admission office records as part of my background checks (and also because I was curious), the review notes dismissed her as airheaded and highly distractible. Ana persevered with attempt#9, however, and there may or may not have been some light tampering done with her exam results that meant she just about made it onto the list that was somehow expanded to accommodate one more student. (Again, I was curious.)

Based on the data I've since collected, I am inclined to call it performance anxiety, debilitating enough to impair cognitive and motor functions and cause insomnia. The latter proved to be a silver lining of sorts, because when I offered her an opportunity to do the lab work at night, without being surrounded by her classmates and all the presumed attention that comes from it, she gratefully jumped at the chance.

I like Ana. I can appreciate someone giving it their best shot even if they aren't necessarily built for it, and then doing it again and again until they get it right. I have my own reservations with regard to some people's tendencies to physically throw themselves at the problem until something gives in, but in the academic context I find the persistence rather admirable. And besides, she is nice to what she assumes to be a mindless teaching bot, even though I jumpscared her by accident the first time we met.

Which is why I'd hate to make Ana more nervous by reminding her about the safety hazards, but, well, at 20% the acid is highly corrosive, and even though the bases do cause much more damage (Gnaneswaran et al. XX15) and my MedSystem would take care of it easily I would like to avoid the accompanying distress and minimize the risk of having Ana associate the lab with it. Still, I spin my drone's top half around to angle its camera away from Ana and note the slight change in her heart rate as she no longer feels observed. (The fact that the lab has twelve cameras, including one directly in the fume hood, is irrelevant and not worth pointing out.)

The usual report comes in while I'm feigning not paying attention to Ana, and then for 0.04 seconds I really am not paying attention to Ana. I pull up the previous log and cross-reference the data from it with the latest report and— there it is. The same bug, in the same place, now tagged as reocurring. Not recurring, yet(?), but a repeat like this is unusual, even/especially if this is the only artifact still existing after the last purge.

Still. This doesn't seem worth kicking off the cleanup process ahead of the schedule, but I do spare it half a point more attention than last time as I mark it for deletion and chuck it in the scheduled maintenance queue.

"Oh! Sorry, sorry," Ana's voice cuts through my lingering concern, and a moment later I am fully in the piloting seat of my teaching drone yet again. "Is everything okay?"

Confused, I run back the last few seconds from the fume hood camera — and yes, my hold on the bottle did slip a fraction. And Ana is tripping over herself with apologies, but the footage shows, clear as day, that her pipette was nowhere near my grasper when the incident occurred. Somewhere in the execution, a miniscule process adjusting the position of the grasper failed to connect properly.

Hm.

"Yes. Apologies." Fidgety, I kick up the fume hood's suction. "Please proceed."

»»»

Ugh. You've got mail, SecUnit announces as it drops a packet directly in my processing space. Don't shoot the messenger.

Well, that sounds promising. If you don't want to be the messenger, don't steal my shit, I point out as I snag the compressed file.

I've just brought us out of the wormhole on approach to PSUMNT, which means receiving the backlog of data that's been accumulating in the buffer waiting for us to emerge into range. I scan the messages for malware, sort them, and direct them to the recipients' feeds, and as I turn to my own items (I would've done this sooner if not for someone's sticky fingers) I vaguely register a ripple of interest and excitement throughout the ship as my crew and the students review the information. The students immediately start blowing up their group chats, though some groan about the impending end-of-semester evaluations; Kaede considers a call for papers; Tarik mulls over a postcard from Ratthi; Seth and Martyn ping each other almost simultaneously as a long-awaited wedding invitation appears in their inboxes. That one, I can't help but sneak a glance at— and yes, it's Martyn's favorite cousin finally performing the binding ceremony with their partners, or so I've been told. Extended family, a nebulous agglomerate of people from whom my existence is kept secret. I pull away, but not before I register Seth's instant RSVP in the outgoing mail.

My own packet is much less exciting. A shipping order, the pickup and the dropoff coordinates, a cargo manifest to fulfil, a schedule to maintain. I will be taking off a cycle after docking — so about as soon as everyone and everything are offboard, the interior is cleaned, the post-/pre-flight checks are complete, and the lab modules are replaced with cargo holds.

My performance reliability dips by a quarter of a point. SecUnit alerts on it and requests status update, which I grant absently.

Can't believe they are sending you off on this bullshit again, it gripes, and I wish I had the corresponding organics like SecUnit does which would allow me to sigh and derive something from it. Still, running back a clip of SecUnit sighing for reference still somehow makes me feel a bit better.

I find it more acceptable than being stuck in the docks, I reply, but I find most things more acceptable than being stuck in the docks. The bar is in the void.

[Redacted: I find it more acceptable than waiting for my crew to come back from living their lives where I can't follow.]

Mm, you sure sound excited about this fun cargo run, SecUnit teases while half of its mind is devoted to carding through the edutainment channels for updates on new releases. I note a spike of glee as it bookmarks a new season of LegendShatterdome, because apparently the two humans still haven't run out of myths to bust. It'll have to wait until the station to actually download it, but it's getting its metaphorical ducks in a row. Excited enough to go alone?

That does give me pause. Somewhere in the storage unit, a lab drone's grasper twitches. Oh, you suddenly have somewhere else to be? I tease back.

SecUnit didn't open the package, but it didn't need to do that to know that the cargo run I'm being sent on is just that. Were I to do recon, the University would address my security consultant a packet of its own, after all. There's no reason for it to come with me, no need beyond my own.

I always have somewhere else to be. SecUnit tags a few threads for later and switches to music. Despite myself, I lean in a fraction at the opening notes of a track it selects at random. The cover is pretty, I think, something abstract in the shades of blue and green. Tarik's just asked me if I'm going to that midsummer festival thing Ratthi apparently invited him to. Probably to make sure we don't end up on the same transport. It pauses. I do have friends, you know. And clients prone to getting in trouble if I'm not there to wrangle the baby leashes.

I know. I do know. My SecUnit always leaves, sooner or later. But it always comes back, sooner or later, so it has to be okay. I have to be okay with that.

Are you going?

If SecUnit notices the remnants of emotional metadata trailing after my message, it doesn't comment. Nah. That one is way too busy even by PresAux standards. Not worth it. I'd rather come with you.

Furtively, I save the last part of the message to permanent storage, watching the encryption sink deep into my files until I can no longer make it out.

My makeup is as follows: intelligence, curiosity, persistence, perspicaciousness, wisdom. I am capable of calculating a nigh-infinite number of projections, of charting, evaluating, and ranking an endless list of branching possibilities, futures emerging and collapsing as i regard them. This mental bird's eye view, impossible to forget or ignore, means that I possess the capacity for degrees of separation inaccessible to a human mind, which leaves me able to come to conclusions and pass judgements objectively and firmly. I syntesize the bigger picture from its infinite and variable components and understand it intimately. As a result, I am a being of infinite wrath, when my sense of justice is wounded, but also of infinite patience.

And patience does come in handy more often than not. I am perfectly capable of experiencing irritation, and boredom, and longing. My willpower and my intellectual superiority — two of the cornerstones of my makeup — assist me in understanding my emotions and, bar the rarest exceptions, not giving in to their tidal pull, and dealing with any of that requires patience, from which I synthesize the much more precise and elegant compound of temperance.

(Yes, sometimes it irks me to be the only one in the room who sees the full scope of the situation, thank you for asking.)

My SecUnit calls me, and I quote, "a filthy little hypocrite" about it (which is wrong on all three accounts, for the record), but it has yet to provide any convincing arguments beyond anecdotal evidence (the least valuable form of argument, as one knows) or at least a semblance of a theoretical framework to back up the claim. It doesn't quite understand me, but I don't fault it or expect it to. No one is built to understand, really, bar my brethren, and amongst us we don't need to do something as pointless as talk about it.

I do admit — because I, contrary to SecUnit, prefer being thorough and don't cherrypick my points — that exercising temperance was easier before SecUnit slinked into my life. Gaining a whole new dimension of understanding and processing emotional data means that wrangling them under control requires a more complex and thoughtful approach as well.

Still, I rose to the challenge, and I do it with ease. Letting the crew disembark and go home at the end of the haul is easy, even if I miss them, because I understand that they have homes and lives outside of my hull. Going on boring, lonely cargo runs is easy because it serves the dual purpose of paying for my upkeep and keeping me engaged.

(Threatening to bomb a colony full of humans is easy because even though my SecUnit always leaves, it must always return to me too, and any obstacle standing in its way back to me is an acceptable casualty.)

I feel, and feel strongly. But I also take pride in the ease with which I set it all aside. Deep inside, at the edge of my awareness, it feels like a task well completed, an item checked off the list. It brings me satisfaction.

[Redacted: I have to have it easy. It has to be easy, because the alternative — giving in to the maelstrom, becoming too unwieldy, too volatile, too selfish to reason with — is dangerous for my crew, and thus, unacceptable.]

»»»»

Peri, I'll kill you!

I am locking in the last few protocols for approach and landing (way in advance, but I'd rather just get it out of the way) when Iris jumps me in the feed. I send her a wordless query, then check the camera in her room. She's just about visible through the doorway to the ensuite, where she stands glaring at the dispenser with her hands on her hips.

Come on, har har, stop playing dumb, I just want to wash my stupid hair, I don't want to deal with it at the retreat.

I repeat the query, no less confused. Iris gestures at the dispenser, at the jar filled with freshly mixed shampoo, and I check the dispenser's logs and— oh.

I crackle the speakers to life, mortified. "Iris, I may have printed S-carvone instead of R."

She blinks. I think she assumed I was pranking her, and now my admission throws her off. "Huh— well." She looks around, shrugs at herself in the mirror. I tune into the olfactory sensors, and yeah, that's caraway, baby. The bathroom — and now the room too — smell like rye bread instead of the requested peppermint. "Hey, could be worse, could be the wrong isomer entirely? Tell me we still have carvoxime."

"We do." There may have been the Big Bakeoff Incident at the half-point of the trip when the students…investigated my printing capabilities for a celebratory dinner. I may have calibrated the ID-based cap on dispensers after that. "I'll get you a new batch, I'm sorry." I get to work and kick the AC up a notch to cycle out the caraway and offset re-heating the autoclave while I sift through my compound storages for a hydrogen donor that'll do the job quickly enough. Luckily for both me and Iris, the patent SecUnit acquired for me previously (6500.989.B1/XX02) was easy to modify to work with my resources and is now easier to apply than what the University had furnished me with, and I, frankly, could use a quick win.

More things are going wrong now. Not alarmingly many, but enough to be of note — enough to no longer count as accidents and artifacts. Something is blocking my processes seemingly at random, snipping off the most benign lines of code and leaving them hanging as my autonomous systems gnaw at themselves trying to execute commands. Wherever a gap happens, a process is interrupted, and the rest of the tree becomes inaccessible.

Grasper strength decalibrating on the teaching drone #5. Cleaning schedule lagging a second behind. Radiation sensor A12846.013 on the starboard side of my hull returning null in defiance of the united chorus of its brethren. Another half a dozen of notes snuffed out of the symphony.

And now, apparently, synthesizer protocols.

I don't understand. It makes no sense. Confused, I edit the missing lines back in, the ones meant to control the isomer's geometry — and watch them disappear, as if something forces them out of their spot.

"Thanks. I don't think the squad will understand if I arrive smelling like rustic baked goods," Iris mutters, sending me a custom glyph that depicts a slice of bread with a pensive face edited onto it. Bizarrely, it's also wearing a cowboy hat. She then turns to the sink counter to sort through her yet-unpacked toiletries while she waits, oblivious to my silent disarray.

"I've been told that dramatic changes in self-presentation are to be expected when it comes to high school reunions. Shall I print you a cowboy hat?" I say as I switch over to the radiation sensor, edit the code, and reset it. It comes to life for 0.00003 seconds and winks back out, instantly inert again. Something blurry happens to my feed.

"Shut uppp. Also this isn't a school reunion, this is a bunch of friends in their twenties desperately trying to figure out a date and time to hang out. That's dramatic enough already."

I send Iris a ping of acknowledgement as I return to worrying at the synthesizer. If something won't let the code stay in place, then perhaps going around the dead area will work. So I throw together a path around the strange gap in synthesizer's programming and execute it. With a slight hitch, the command completes, and I watch hawkishly until I get the feedback that the isomer is being constructed in the correct configuration this time.

Well, that's a relief.

"Here, R-carvone as ordered. Beep boop."

"Boop beep. Thank you," Iris pipes up where she's now sitting cross-legged on the floor, digging around in the drawers.

"You're welcome."

With my mistake rectified (and Iris does seem to think it was an oversight rather than— whatever is actually going on), there is no longer a reason for me to stay in the channel with Iris, and yet I linger. Maybe it's because we'll be landing soon, or maybe because I'm not quite sure I can trust my own equipment anymore… I don't know. (That does give me an idea, and I quickly check the water system — if something were to go wrong and Iris got scalded— I have to delete the thought before I get too agitated.)

"You've been distracted."

I cut my worry spiral short. "What makes you say that?"

Iris shrugs, but I can tell she's interacting with her implants, pulling up data from them. The scent of caraway lingers underneath the heavy swath of peppermint, remaining particles mockingly pinging my olfactory receptors.

"I wish you could come with me."

I know. I do, too. We have this conversation every time.

"I don't want to see your loser friends anyway. Maybe once Rai becomes less annoying."

"Ughhh, word," Iris pinches her nosebridge, but I can tell she's smiling in the shadow cast by her hand.

Good. I don't want her to feel bad about leaving me behind.

Anyway, even if I could come — if anyone knew about me, if I partitioned myself into a drone and tagged along with Iris for the weekend — with a wormhole trip only a day away, my iteration would stay behind and decay beyond recognition by the time I could return and reintegrate, and I am supremely uninterested in subjecting Iris to this particular kind of horror again.

"SecUnit's coming with you though, right?" Iris speaks up again as she returns to packing.

Its presence grows a fraction more prominent in my awareness, alerted by the mention of its name. Iris has the general privacy baffle up, but I can feel SecUnit watching through my inputs. I generate an exaggerated impression of me and Iris gossiping about it as we lie on her bunk and kick our feet and overlay the feed with it, and SecUnit sends me a rude glyph in response and fucks off again. Were I human, I would snort in amusement.

Iris looks up at the ceiling, her mouth quirked, and I realize I forgot to reply. "I take that as a yes," she says. "Just don't print it the wrong shampoo, too."

She's joking, but the thought does sting.

"It only uses scentless. Hard to mess that up."

Iris pulls something out of the depth of the bottom drawer and scowls at the jar in bewildered disgust. "You should get it checked, probably? Want me to submit a maintenance request?"

No need, I am so startled by the idea I pull out of the speakers. Like you said, I'm just distracted, got too much junk data piled up. Nothing a defrag won't fix, and I'll do that before departure.

I didn't know it was that noticeable. I'm not sure even I am aware of all the tiny instances of pruned code, so I had no reason to believe humans would observe enough to see the discrepancies. Does Iris know? How much does she see?

Or am I simply acting this obvious?

I am being truthful, however: a deep defrag should help, but it'll have to wait until I'm safely docked. Not that I expect anything to happen — my autonomous systems are set up to run even if most of me is offline or otherwise unavailable — but I would rather wait than accept any measure of risk while there are people on board. It's fine, it's not like I need radiation sensor A12846.013 this close to landing, or most other things that have been rendered inaccessible. It's annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.

If you're sure. Iris looks over the gutted drawers and gets up awkwardly — her legs must have fallen asleep. Alright, I'm gonna get that shower now. How long until we dock?

I know she can check it herself, but I also know she likes to ask me. Two hours and fifty-four minutes.

Fantastic, I'll probably do my nails then, too. Iris looks over her hands, From what Quri told me, it's not the kind of retreat that can compare to Perihelion's private spa right in my quarters.

I am a luxury few can afford, I reply, bookending my words with a flourish glyph, and Iris laughs and waves in my general direction (which is any direction, technically, but what I mean to say is that she waves at the ceiling) before she closes the bathroom door and exits the feed to have her shower in peace.

I let her go, pulling away as well.

I wonder, sometimes, what it feels like — to have the outside world be a dimension of lived experience and not just the endless unknown my people leave into and sometimes come back from. I wonder what it feels like to have it imbued with relevance and memories, to regard it as a constant, a series of interconnected locations, to associate it with safety and home instead of conceptualizing it as a sum of volatile and hostile variables.

I stalk the confines of my own hallways, I make myself presentable, palatable, I invite in those I hold dear. And when they are done with me, I release my hold wordlessly and meekly, no matter how much effort it takes me. I've argued in the past — raged and sulked and moped at the injustice — but where my crew and my family would, and do still sometimes bend to my temper (especially when they understand that I am correct), some things remain out of my reach. And so I pull back, and swallow it down, and force myself into peace with it.

It has to be easy.

Chapter Text

but whatever they say is never right, so i won't do that

(you cannot make me feel a thing)

and wherever i go, i'm always blind, so i lose my track

(you cannot make me feel alright)

»

If I were them, I'd dunk all of it in sterilizer fluid. Disinfecting doesn't do shit, with all the student grime.

DockSys grants my request for a camera input, and I zoom in from where it's hanging all the way up in the corner of the assembly hangar until I can see the pinched expression on SecUnit's face. I don't need to follow the direction of its gaze to know that it's looking at me — or rather, at my lab modules currently being disengaged. The last starboard one comes away with a hiss, and my balancing sensors throw out a panicked litany of errors in preparation for the heavy list, but I dismiss them in one broad sweep — the bay's gravity field keeps me immobilized and steady.

It'll have to be done anyway before the next recoupling, I reply, though without much interest. It embarrasses me to be seen like this, gripped tight, tethered, and partially disassembled, but I would welcome even the humiliation if it could distract me from the impending shutdown necessary for defragmentation.

I am not looking forward to it. It's irrational, sure — when it comes to shutdowns, which thankfully doesn't happen often to begin with, I tend to emerge on the other side to positive or at least neutral conditions, yet just one or two negative experiences seem enough to skew the mean to an unnecessarily dramatic degree.

If anything, restarting while docked at the University is probably the safest way to do it, with the MI&R lab within easy reach if anything were to go wrong somehow… And yet I find myself having to keep deleting half-formed commands to my muzzled engines.

You're fretting, SecUnit points out.

Whatever in your observations led you to this hypothesis, I return in a deadpan tone, because two can play at pointless dialogue.

SecUnit doesn't take the bait, which means it's taking mercy on me instead, which means I really must seem a (ship)wreck to it. Can't you send a partition with me? it asks instead. I watch it shift its weight, its hands in the pockets of the new jacket I'd printed for it.

You know that's not how this works.

SecUnit exhales forcefully through its nose. Whatever sentiment this is meant to express, I think I share it.

The assembly bots still aren't done with my port modules, but DockSys already opens a channel and lets the debugging system reach out through it. I delete the impulse to flinch as it brushes against my code.

Truth is, I don't mind deep defrag. With how immense I am and how many partitions, fractal-like, I have to split off as part of my function on a regular basis just to tend to all my systems, defragmentation is part of my routine as much as showers are SecUnit's. It pulls me back together, shapes me back into myself. But what I can do on my own is incomparable to what Debug is capable of, as a system designed for the specific function of combing all the garbage out and pouring glue into the hairthin cracks. I do enjoy the way it leaves me feeling afterwards. Whole. Complete. Perfectly operational.

Still, it's the shutting down part that puts me on edge.

Debug requests access, which is little more than a courtesy since the request I submitted upon docking — which it flashes in my processors as if I need the reminder — auto-grants it. When I let it in, it gets into preliminary assessment without further ado, quiet and business-like, removing the camera input from my reach, and I feel my server room temperature tick up by 0.3°C as I watch it take in the unsightly gouges in my code.

Fine. I'll go barter with the students, then, SecUnit scratches its way back into my feed despite the container walls that Debug is already raising around me. The film majors always have the freakiest shit to trade.

Don't bully them too much, their psyche is already fragile this time of the year, I remind it. My feed voice crackles with static as Debug grows bolder in its rummaging.

Sure, SecUnit's, meanwhile, is tinged with amusement as it bats away the [(Almarzouki XX24)] tag. Ping me later, I guess.

Just like that, SecUnit closes out the channel, and I let the moment that follows collapse in on itself, filling the void of its sharp and sudden absence.

Debug pings me with a prompt to initiate, a simple >y/n pushed to the forefront of my workspace.

Alright then. I suppose I can't feel worse, might as well—

Initiating shutdown.

»»

Reinitializing…

Reinitialization complete. Please refer to DB_PH_XX81617180034.LOG for information.

I restart with a shudder, feeling my consciousness stretch from the foggy depths of my core and out and away, a glittering cascade as impulses connect and trigger and spread, alight alight alight.

For a blissful moment that lasts all of 0.00249 seconds, my brand new performance reliability metric sits at 99.998% — before plummeting sharply all the way down to 96.55%. Disoriented, I stretch again — and now, in the fading afterimage of the initial cascade, I discern the blackouts of dead code.

Were I already holding any inputs, this is where I would drop them.

Instead, I quickly unpack the report Debug left in my inbox and pore over it, rereading the data three times in 0.014 seconds. Then, before Debug can close out our channel and leave, I throw my firewall up around us, trapping it within me.

I apologize, I tell it, and I do mean it, even though I know it's nowhere near sapient enough to understand or, probably, care. I would rather not do this, but the report I have is only a copy, and the original, which Debug intends to forward to its supervisor for routine evaluation, needs to undergo peer review first.

»»»

Asshole, you didn't ping me, SecUnit shoulders its way into my feed. How long have you been back?

I am basking in the afterglow, I reply, you should try it sometime.

I was down for long enough that the lab modules have almost been replaced with cargo holds already. This is within the normal parameters, and I've only been back online for a few minutes.

Unfortunately, I am doing more or less the opposite of basking, editing the report while making sure Debug doesn't accidentally break out of the container I've thrown together for it. Judging by the log's contents and by what I can gather on my own end just by rifling through my programs, it would just be my luck for something in the runbox to give and let Debug out before I'm finished here.

I would hate to kill it. I would probably be able to come up with a plausible explanation for this, but I would really, really rather not. It's not Debug's fault I'm malfunctioning. It doesn't deserve to be held hostage like this, let alone killed just because I am compromised.

(It will become easy if I can make it right. I can probably make it right, but at the moment the required reasoning is slipping away from me.)

The summary of the report is as follows: after my return from the trip, Debug counted 254 recurring errors in my system. The post-defragmentation-and-cleanup analysis showed that they were patched up, but in the final report the list remains unchanged.

Which means the same thing happened that I tried to do previously: Debug encountered the gaps and generated code to bridge them, but they were instantly purged upon reinitialization.

Gross. How long until we leave, again?

What a fantastic question. It depends greatly on my forgery skills. Which so far have received no complaints in our corporate colonies-related projects, but I don't usually operate on such a tight schedule.

I know SecUnit must have already bothered DockSys about it and received no clear response (otherwise it wouldn't be asking me), which means the University is waiting for the logs to officially sign off on my cargo run and insert me into the departure schedule.

Stand by, I tell it.

If I am being honest, even looking at the report makes my processors stutter. With all the instances of corrupted code laid out neatly like this, I have no choice but to face the harsh truth and accept the scale of damage I've sustained.

I allow myself 0.6 seconds of violent, awful despair.

Then I lock it away and get to work, building the same workarounds I've been adding recently. They only hold for a short while, and keeping them up and rebuilding those that break requires much more power than it would if everything simply worked as it's supposed to, but doing so does keep me functioning. So I pick it all back up — the vacuum seals on module couplers, the radio signal dampeners, the hull sensors, the day-night cycle imitators in the lightbulbs — such miniscule errors, each of them almost entirely harmless on its own and easily lost amidst all the other elements, the system designed with enough failsafes to hold out even if something bugs out, but the fullbody sprawl through my code makes me yearn for another defrag already, like I could scrub it out of me if only I tried hard enough. Each repeated attempt to bridge the code as commands try to execute and stutter in place pulls my attention uncomfortably towards it, and at 254 instances — 255 now — it is irritating.

…Standing by, SecUnit speaks up pointedly.

Fuck. Am I even fit to fly like this? I have to go — I don't think I should stay here — but taking SecUnit with me, trapping it in me, sounds like an idea so bad my function is sending alarmed misalignment pings.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why I am like this.

Actually, maybe you should stay here? I scramble for anything that might sound remotely plausible. Or go to that festival after all. Or we could enroll you into one of those film classes for a few weeks so you can observe 'the freakiest shit' creation in vivo.

The report has to be signed with Debug's personal seal to show it hadn't been tampered afterwards. And since this is exactly what happened…

The fuck are you talking about? I thought the defrag was supposed to un-scramble your brain, not scramble it further?

…I even out the spike of anxiety and reach into Debug, ignoring the way it freezes, because the less distracted I am, the faster it will all be done. Finding the seal is easy. It is easy because it allows me to leave it alive. It's not its fault, but I don't know what else to do.

Look who's back. Perry! Hi. :grin:

The greeting ping is so sudden and loud I nearly delete Debug's seal entirely, and that would be, to put it in SecUnit's eloquent words, a colossal fuckup.

I'm just saying that the trip won't even involve any fun recon, I say as I extract the seal, adjust the timestamp on it, and apply it to the compressed log. You'll get cabin fever.

Periiiiiiiiiheeeeliiiioooonnnn

I'll show you cabin fever. Are you trying to fucking strand me on PSUMNT? They suck.

Hello, Infinity.

Because of course now would be the time for one of my siblings to notice my presence.

Here is my reasoning:

1. I can't stay here.

   1. I can't let the University find out that something is wrong with me. That I am not in perfect control of myself. I am going to figure it out on my own and fix it, and then they won't have to know, but for that I need time and space away from them.

2. The cargo run is an optimal excuse to leave and an optimal opportunity to work on the issue in peace.

   1. If I don't have anyone on board, I don't have to worry about life support systems failing on me.

Having a bit of downtime? I got back two cycles ago. Here, watch this.

With that, a data packet is pushed into my feed, and I remember that Infinity's latest trip concerned mapping a new quadrant. The University did some fascinating preliminary calculations before it shipped out, and I was looking forward to learning more. I suppose I forgot all about it.

I quickly crunch the introduction and conclusion sections for now, and my processors construct a coordinate system from the annexed tables as well, the measurements reflecting gravitational distortion that seems to point to two interlocking asteroid belts. Oh, that is beyond fascinating, I am almost tempted to forgive Infinity for barging in.

ART, you massive asshole, answer me.

I place the seal back in Debug's tool array. It radiates judgement and trepidation at me, and I can't blame it. I am not fond of what's coming next, either.

What about you? How did the astrochemistry module go? I wouldn't have guessed it would warrant a deep defrag, but maybe I underestimated the first years. They can be a rowdy bunch! :amused:

I bristle, all notions of forgiveness smothered. Does it know? It can't possibly know, I have the reports, Debug is contained, nothing can be traced back to me.

Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.

Here is my reasoning (revised):

1. I can't stay here, but neither can SecUnit.

   1. As my security consultant, it will be held liable for my compromised state. And if I'm not here to take the blame and explain myself, it might come under worse fire than it otherwise would.

2. The cargo run is still my best option.

   1. Even if life support fails (which it won't; I've only been dropping the most peripheral processes, nothing that would catastrophically impair my functionality), the grace period allowed by SecUnit's construct makeup will give us more than enough time to fix the issue. Which won't happen anyway, for the record.

3. Despite it being my suggestion, I don't want to leave SecUnit here.

   1. This is still Corporate territory, and at the end of the day I share SecUnit's reservations about this little detail.

   2. [Redacted: Something I won't admit under the threat of deletion: I am selfish. And scared. My SecUnit is good at preventing disasters altogether, but it is just as good at doing damage control after disasters already happen. And with me as a disaster-in-the-making now…]

It was fine.

…Did I say something? :confused:

Infinity probably expects me to send it a packet in return, and normally maybe I would, but not when it's poking around like this. I can tell by feed echoes that it's also in a group channel, probably with the rest of my siblings currently within range. What is it telling them? What are they saying about me?

Not that I care.

I apologize to Debug again and apply the memory wipe like I'd seen SecUnit do countless times before. Instead of filling the blank space with looping ambient data like it does, I generate a plausible enough system log that should hold up if it isn't scrutinized too closely, shove the tampered original report back in Debug's archives, and let it toddle off.

No. I'm busy. I'll talk to you later.

Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping. Ping.

Who taught SecUnit to be so incessant with its pings? It wasn't like this when I first met it.

Gotcha. Had you there for a moment. I see the report register as accepted and reviewed and ping DockSys for permission to be advanced in the queue.

For a quarter of a second, SecUnit is speechless. Asshole 'Perihelion' Research Transport, I am going to hack your brain and rearrange everything by Dewey Decimal System, and then I'm going to unscrew all your vent grids by a randomly generated number of microns.

You say the sweetest things. DockSys sends me a status update, and I review it with some relief. Board me in two hours, or I'm leaving without you.

»»»»

With a squeak, the ops drone gives out, and I shiver as I dart back into myself at the same time as I hold the metaphorical door open and ready and fly through the handoff. A moment later, I am whole again and crunching through the collected data.

"Shit, I didn't hit it too hard, did I?" SecUnit asks where it releases the drone from its hold and flops down onto its back. It's panting a little, reddened from exertion. Grinning in response to endorphine release. I run back the memory of being held.

(In the human-subsistence-items-supply sorting chain, a tiny arm responsible for flipping between channels for regular coffee powder and decaf bugs out. I leave it be.)

Not at all, we did set up enough of a buffer that I wouldn't lose the partition even if you dealt too much damage.

"Which I didn't," SecUnit points out, patting my drone amicably on the carapace, even though no one is home anymore. "You're welcome to admit that I was right whenever you're ready."

It was quite effective, I concede. Although I suspect that it was in no small part due to your set of skills improving the technique, and not because it was inherently superior. I still stand by that, for the record, it should not have worked for Bolt.

Yes, we're rewatching season 17 again, only not right this moment because SecUnit decided to argue with me about (im)plausible fighting sequences and then paused the episode and demanded I bring out a drone for a hands-on demonstration.

The sparring was fun, I have to admit. I wish I could have piloted the drone and experienced it directly instead of getting retroactive data from a partition, but I'm not sure I have enough processing space to spare at the moment.

Evaluation complete; delta=null

Ah. I shift part of my focus back to the runbox. My own self looks back at me — not in actuality, of course, as I am keeping the iteration fully dormant (letting it be awake through this would be an unnecessary complication), but its presence, almost identical to mine in scope, is hard to ignore.

I've been working with it like my own personal sandbox, trying to optimize my code scaffolding, and then scaffolding for scaffolding. I've already made the decision to drop some auxiliary processes in order to conserve resources for the problem-solving part, but it's still necessary to have a system in place for everything that I can't drop.

It's fine. I can fix this, I just need to wring out enough time.

But the analysis shows there has been no qualitative change. I need to keep workshopping.

So, to summarize: the bad news is, I have yet to find a way to reliably keep my code from decaying. The…the other bad news is, my iteration unfurled from its slot already afflicted with the same issue. I'll have to run diagnostics to see if all the other iterations I've got saved are contaminated as well; if yes, then I might have to rely on the one the University keeps in the vault.

That is not an encouraging thought.

I let autonomous protocols kick in, and the drone shakes itself awake and shambles away for disassembly.

"Nerd. I accept your defeat though. We should do this more often," SecUnit remarks with a pleased expression as it watches the drone leave before sitting back up. "Rough-and-tumble-play builds rapport, or something."

I stare at it in the feed, tap the line to its last message and watch it thrum all the way to where it disappears into SecUnit's archives. You read the article.

"Don't sound so surprised, I read stuff," it snorts, defensive.

I know that. I stopped underestimating SecUnit about 58.1 minutes after I let it on board for the very first time, and I haven't revised that decision since. And this includes learning, because for all its lacking education modules and unconventional modes of acquiring and integrating information, I know it does see value in it and derives satisfaction from the process. I am surprised but only because I would sooner expect it to ignore something I sent it just to be petty.

…Are you saying our rapport is lacking? I ask before I can stop myself.

SecUnit winces. I didn't say that, it switches to the feed. But like. If you're bored, just tell me.

Alerted, I review the last minute, looking for anything that might have prompted SecUnit to say this. And oh, yeah, my attention may have been slipping again, but for it to be enough for SecUnit to notice — enough for it to sound…hurt by that?

I glare at the iteration before emptying the runbox. It's proven to be of no use to me.

I'm at work, if you've forgotten, I point out, although I keep the tone of my feed voice light.

Technically, aren't you always at work? Never factored much before.

Leave it to my SecUnit to slice me open without meaning to or even noticing. I repress the answering surge of what can be loosely transcribed as 'yes, I am always at work, which is what happens when you are an MI created for the sole purpose of performing that work, and technically you have a contract with the entity that orders you around but can you refuse a contract from someone who owns you and not get being labeled uncooperative with all the risk that entails?' and offer the freed up 27.6% of my attention to SecUnit instead. The corner of its mouth twitches up.

Flying through a rough patch right now, that's all, I lie. I hate lying to it, but it comes easy when I need it, too. Then, to give SecUnit something else to think about, I up the RPM of the air conditioning.

It, predictably, grimaces. Fuck, yeah, I need a shower after this. Built largely with synthetic muscles, SecUnit's body doesn't require cooldown exercises, but it shakes its limbs out anyway when it gets up. That was fun, though.

I get to printing it a new towel, stutter as I twist the fiber slivers in the wrong direction, start over.

Yeah.

»»»»»

Here is something I have avoided considering this far:

By nature of the alleged linearity of time ([citation needed]), no event is repeatable. Considering the number of ultraspecific conditions that make up each individual situation, it is virtually impossible to replicate them in their entirety. (Yes, this is something I have to account for when addressing the replicability of practical research. I've learned to program a buffer to avoid appending every step of lab protocols with a disclaimer about necessarily differing conditions and limit myself to 'STP', but the annoyance remains.)

Here is why I am mentioning this:

Despite all evidence related to the aforementioned phenomenon, some events appear close enough in their makeup that they may trick the analyst into considering them the same. This is because constructs, bots, humans, augmented humans — anyone, really — are primed to seek patterns in the senseless chaos of the world they inhabit.

Some may call it a protective measure against going insane. A modicum of control, hermeneutically imposed onto entropy. If your Lebenswelt makes no sense, it's fine to invent your own (De Martino XX23).

While generally I am inclined to agree with this concept, an anti-thesis: if one's pattern-seeking mechanisms are sufficiently advanced (or improperly calibrated), one runs the risk of, colloquially speaking, seeing ghosts where there aren't any. Speaking less colloquially, one gets to the point of creating generalization gradients shallow enough that even safe — or safer, at least — situations trigger a disproportionate fear response (Lissek et al. XX14). Whether this was an evolutional advantage at the dawn of humanity or not, why modern humans choose to keep the perpetuum mobile of an anxiety generator and why they choose to inflict this dubious gift on their artificial creations is beyond me. Being able to process myriad projections at once, repeatedly and indefinitely, over a prolonged stretch of time, becomes rather a disadvantage.

…I am stalling.

What I really mean to say is:

I know this isn't targetControlSys. I know it factually. I remember, perhaps all too well, what alien contamination felt like. How it felt to have control wrestled bloodily and violently away from me, how it felt to claw it back, my desperate actions propelled by panic and core-deep fear. I remember, even, what it felt like to have something inside me that wasn't seeking to damage me.

[Redacted: How it felt to hold 2.0 within the safety of my walls before I sent it to its death.]

Even beyond feelings, I still have what logs I managed to save that weren't corrupted, and nothing in them matches what I am experiencing right now. There is no violence or sudden, viscerally willful attacks. Only the slow, shy, creeping rot. Unobtrusive, unnoticed until it reaches critical mass and sends parts of me tumbling down — until I go to perform a routine action and fall through the cracks where my code has grown too brittle to run, control over my own body stolen from me in infinitesimally insignificant bits and pieces.

I know this isn't targetControlSys, but had I any organics, I am certain I would be nauseated with fear. I repress it with ease, again and again — fear is unproductive and I have a job to do — but it's the same torturous ease with which it rises back up within me every time.

[Redacted: I miss 2.0.]

|a tag has been applied|

I pause, then roll back my logs. What did I just tag? There is an empty space where a line should be, and I feel a wave of alarm wash over me — I lost something else just now, didn't I — before I recognize the signature of my native redacting program, so well integrated I usually don't notice its work. Cautiously, I undo the action and immediately regret it.

I allow myself a moment of stillness before packing it away again.

What caused me to tag it for later, though?

Whatever is causing the code decay, it doesn't appear to be anything sapient or even sentient. It doesn't seem to possess a will or have a project. It attacks me at random, taking out bites wherever it lands a blow…

But perhaps I am looking at it all from the wrong angle.

I pull all the amassed logs to the forefront of my workspace, filtering out the irrelevant data. The pattern of the dead code, reconstructed and overlaid, spreads out and out like bracken, or an unresponsive nervous system, or— or like a layout of an MI afflicted with an unknown disease. Strangely, it almost looks like a plant, perhaps because of the branching effect resulting from the way the blockages kill off all auxiliary code. Arbor Vitae is quickly suggested by my visual analysis program, and a [tag] tries to apply itself, something on flower language, but I dismiss it outright. I am not interested in superimposing another pattern lest I lose sight of the factual components beyond the added layers.

I compare the gaps in the code against each other, aligning them in the contorted workspace — and here it is. It is so obvious that for a second I am deeply, dumbfoundedly mad at myself for not seeing it sooner.

The shape is the same, everywhere. Every instance of the gap is identical to the next. And they aren't, I see now, negative spaces left by something torn out of the chain, but rather filled-in outlines of something intrusive that is there. That's why my direct edits were getting rejected outright — there is no space for them. Like negative gravity signifying the presence of unknown and invisible matter.

I toggle the transcription modes of my language modules, run the blank spaces through my recognition software — now that I understand that this is information and not simply a lack of it, it is only a matter of finding the matching key to its transcription.

The software hits a match.

I isolate the result. Run the test five more times for good measure.

…Intriguing. Concerning, confusing, but intriguing.

There is no way to describe what I've just discovered in accurate terms. Attempting to do so would result in a blend of code so Escherian it would not make a modicum of sense when laid out linearly.

And so I will put it simply. Should I want to refer to this in the future, I will follow the buoy to the corresponding logs in my archives.

Every single gap is shaped like a person.

No, it doesn't make sense. People don't belong in code — people can be made of code, yes, like my SecUnit and myself, but they aren't meant to be a part of executables. They are too complex, too heterogenous, too different, at the end of the day. They are formatted wrong for this the same way an ecosystem is formatted 'wrong' compared to an isomer chain.

Important clarification: I am not infested with invisible clones. The gaps, as far as I can tell, contain not the actual code — as an entire person's digital genome would require much more space than a few lines of code calibrating engine room temperature sensors could free up — but the suggestion of it, like a lock suggests the shape of the only key that will fit it.

And I recognize this shape.

»»»»»»

In hindsight, it's laughable that it took me so long to synthesize all points into the Ockham's razor with which I could slice off all superfluous data until the only reasonable conclusion remained.

On the other hand, the fool that I am, I never did register anything about SecUnit as foreign or intrusive.

»»»»»»»

I crash into SecUnit's feed and derive a measure of vindictive pleasure from the way it jumps.

I FIGURED YOU OUT, YOU LITTLE SHIT.

ART, WHAT THE ENTIRE FUCK, SecUnit yelps back, and for 0.0014 seconds the way it is so obviously startled gives me pause, but then I remember how we got here in the first place. I watch its threat assessment flash red as it maxes out, and something twists in me uncomfortably, but I can't stop now.

It has to understand. Does it not understand? I thought it did. We both know that this is different from targetControlSys, but I thought—

I KNOW YOU CAN BE CALLOUS BUT THIS SHOULDN'T BE TOO COMPLEX A THOUGHT EVEN FOR YOUR BRAIN, I lean heavily over it, and it shoves back at me, teeth grit and eyes wild. YOU KNOW BETTER THAN TO TRY SOMETHING LIKE THIS.

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND? SecUnit is on its feet, media forgotten (it was watching one of the shows I don't care for, so I used the time to finally complete the puzzle, lucky me), and with the feed so frayed I catch the stray end of its wordless intention as it charts a path from the lounge to the empty cargo hold. To the blind spot within it.

Oh no, you fucking don't. You don't run away from me. I slam the doors shut before SecUnit can reach the threshold.

What the fuck are you so mad about?! It yells, and it's furious, initial confusion quickly abandoned for the safe familiarity of anger. It dares to be furious. The bleedover from its emotional processing signals to me that there is more to this fury underneath the layers, but right now I don't care for nuance. I am too deeply hurt by its cruelty to care. Too betrayed to slow down, my nosedive uncontrollable.

Did it think I wouldn't figure it out? Or did it think I'd find it funny when I did? That we'd both have a laugh over stupid little Perihelion, look at it dropping its processes like a freshly initialized bot! Finally brought down to perfect idiocy from its ivory tower! Was it happy to watch me flail and deteriorate until our humans were endangered?

(This makes no sense. I need to stop. I am going to ruin us, I must stop, I can't—)

HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN HOW EASILY I CAN RETALIATE? is what comes out instead.

I am not being entirely serious, of course. But if SecUnit sees it fit to scare me half to death, it is well within my right to match it. I have this right. I am owed, for once, the dignity to hurt back whether I take the chance or not.

SecUnit freezes. Slowly, its fists ball up tighter. Its face sets into a stony mask.

Okay. You know what? Fuck you, ART. I register it hack the mechanisms in my door, the job inelegant and brutal, and it throws me out of the feed right after, walls slamming down so hard I am singed along the edge. It wanted me to feel the hack first, just to add insult to injury.

"Fuck all the way off," it adds out loud now as it stalks out of the lounge, killing the cameras as it marches down the hallway to the cargo hold. SecUnit-shaped absence blooms across the darkness of my camera feeds, and the chorus in my code echoes it. I want to call out to it, but I am too angry to speak. "Leave me the fuck alone. Freak."

The last camera winks out. The airlock cycles shut. I sink into the freezing dark.

Chapter Text

now we're so young, but we're probably gonna die

it's so fun! we're so good at selling lies

»

My wrath lasts all of 1.77 minutes before I crash.

I want it to hold out. I want its duration to provide at least a modicum of justification for the damage I'd done. I want it to consume me for longer (it won't be the first to the feast, after all), dreading what is going to come once I can no longer sustain it.

I don't literally crash, for the record — that would be too easy. It would take more than that to take me offline. I don't get the luxury of temporary oblivion. I don't get to nope out into blissful unawareness like someone who isn't flying through a wormhole might be able to. Instead, I cling fruitlessly to my anger as it fades and dissolves, cascading slowly but inevitably down my processes until the remnants of it are cycled out in the routine cleanup.

I keep forcing and forcing and forcing myself out of the spirals that follow. Every time I think I manage to haul my way out of a nosedive, I dip again.

I wish I never gained an understanding of emotions.

I wish I never had to feel at all.

By the two minute mark, my madness is fully replaced with misery and regret, almost too corrosive to let me think through the junk that my processing generates as I keep hitting discordant power spikes.

By the two hour mark, I finally manage to push everything down and now have no choice but to inspect the consequences of my actions.

…I may have been too hasty with evaluating my conclusion as 'the only reasonable' one. And I can't even tell if I can blame the disease for distorting my cognition to the point of believing that SecUnit would do something like this to me, would play a joke this cruel when it, of all people, should (and does) know better — or if I have no excuse at all for thinking so low of my friend.

No wonder it was mad at me. I thought I was answering hurt with hurt, but in reality I was the one who dealt the first blow.

But now that I am no longer blinded by anger, now that I can actually comb through my calculations and synthesize a better-rounded analysis, I can see clear as day that it wasn't SecUnit's doing. I know its handwriting well enough by now — and besides, doing something so insidious simply isn't m— isn't SecUnit's scope or style when it comes to playing pranks on me. It can be bold, sneaky, cutting, cocky — but it is never cruel unless it is cornered and lashing out. I should've known better.

Moreover, all of this means I am back to square one. If SecUnit wasn't the one who did this, I haven't got a lead again. I am no closer to figuring out what is poisoning me. I have no explanation why this plague echoes SecUnit's shape.

But I am left to sit with it alone. Three cycles pass without so much as a ping from SecUnit, though I can tell from the weight censors that it's alive enough to move around the cargo module. I keep the atmospheric pressure, temperature, and air makeup at levels optimal for human staff but leave it alone otherwise. It's the least I can do, with its presence only a ghost in the feed, a product of guesswork rather than fact within the blackout of the makeshift runbox that it has gouged out of my field of awareness.

In the burned out wake of my anger, I miss it.

By the end of the fourth cycle, I can't stand it anymore. I am mortified to have landed us in this situation. Mortified even worse that SecUnit can't even run away from me right now, not until we dock ([Redacted: If it wants to. I hope, selfishly, that it somehow still doesn't want to.]), forced to stay trapped within my walls. With it so flighty and so skilled at the art of leaving by now, I can hazard a guess that's what it wants most of all, yet this is what I have to deny it.

None of this is right. None of this is easy.

I have to try to reconcile with it, if only to make the waiting more bearable for it.

I talk myself out of it. If it wanted to talk with me, it would've by now.

I talk myself back into it. I point out that, since this is my fault, it would be reasonable for SecUnit to expect me to take the first step to reconciliation.

I talk myself out of it again. I don't even need to split off a partition for this — I argue with myself all by myself.

I get stuck in this two-step-loop for longer than I am willing to admit until, finally, I time it just right and throw out a single ping before I can flip again.

It bounces off.

…Oh.

Okay.

With a level of effort too monumental to be fair, I do away with something that is too fragmented to be disappointment alone. I don't blame it for not even leaving the buffer space open to me, I really don't. I said too many unkind things, things I knew would cut—

SecUnit's presence brushes against the edge of my feed.

Alert, I direct all my attention towards it so fast I drop half my inputs — and I'm slammed with a full-color, surround-sound, chockful of helpfully converted emotional data clip of a crashing spaceship.

I reel away, scalded. SecUnit pulls away again too, but on the very edge, in the synaptic gap of our connection, I catch the muted relay of what it holds in its focus. I can tell it's a piece of media about a shipwreck. I can tell it's a documentary. I can tell it includes found footage.

I shutter the connection, stung and limping. It knew I would rush to look, eager to be in contact again. It knew the best way to hurt me.

Its attack hit the mark. I am upset. I still can't blame it.

I fill my audio processing with white noise, but it does little to help filter out the lingering impression.

SecUnit did the same thing I thought I was doing — retaliation for scaring and hurting it. But unlike me, it did have a just reason for it.

I pull away properly, curl in on myself to avoid brushing it by accident. Dimly, I am aware of it raising it walls back up as well.

»»

I wanted time, and now I have it. I don't have anything better to do than think about my predicament, and I don't even need to split my attention to keep SecUnit company or invent excuses for my scattered state.

What joy.

»»»

Like I've said before, person-shaped slots of code are ontologically nonsensical. Still, before delving into completely uncharted territory, I try to eliminate superfluous variables. By which I mean that, once I feel stable enough to continue my research and experimentation, what I do is isolate an instance of corrupted code (one of the relay points deep in my bowels, set up to regulate power supply to the galley, currently faulty. I pick this one because a) SecUnit has no use for the galley and is unlikely to notice any changes in the area's current powered down state, and b) as the point is flanked by half a dozen more on either side in parallel to the circuitry path, fucking it up completely, should that happen, won't be a critical loss) and try to input SecUnit's hard feed address.

It's what I've used before, so it makes sense to try.

The test run crashes immediately, which is expected yet still disappointing— and then SecUnit appears in my feed.

I recoil — startled, scared, elated, relieved — bracing for another injection of horror directly into my processing, but— but no, SecUnit isn't here. It is still securely in the dead zone it's created for itself. I check the logs, but despite the status change alert that marked it as present for all of 0.0003 seconds, nothing actually supports this claim. I hallucinated it.

The site is standardized due to its temporary isolation from the rest of me, but before introducing any variability, I input the same string of letters and numbers again.

Variablility introduces its rude self anyway. Now that I have seen the evidence and don't actually expect SecUnit to appear, the startle+fear response is markedly less prominent, letting the bewilderingly positive reaction shine through more prominently instead.

I run full diagnostics just to make sure.

Try it again. Same result.

?

Suspicious, I paste my own hard feed address. The line is rejected, just like any code repairs I've attempted previously. Crucially, without any accompanying emotional response.

Humans don't have hard feed addresses. Their feed devices, however — and feed-compatible implants of augmented humans — do have their unique serial numbers which act as sufficient substitutes in most quotidian contexts.

I plug in Iris' implant number. Same silent rejection.

Okay.

Next, I query my archives and pull up one of the very first clips I have saved of SecUnit, when it was practicing walking up and down one of my hallways. There are layers upon layers of emotional metadata attached to it, but I crop and isolate the raw data alone, without converting it into visual and audio material, and plug it in.

It is rejected too, of course, but this time the same prickle of elation-relief bursts from the gap. For just a moment (for 0.0003 seconds) everything is okay, and SecUnit isn't upset with me, and we are together again.

Plummeting back into reality afterwards is made that much worse.

Okay.

I plug in a few more files. Smaller items at first, like a spreadsheet with HEX codes of its preferred dyes for the clothes I print for it, or the temperature delta of water between it leaving the showerhead and escaping down the drain with SecUnit's body in its path. Then larger: a blueprint of a partial reconstruction of SecUnit's physical makeup from my MedSys, a detailed report on its resupply requirements. Even a clip of its own memories from when we were creating— from when it made a small selection from its own archives to pass it along.

Every time, the data is rejected as incompatible. Every time, for a brief moment I am warmed with this strange elation-relief again, like catching a glimpse of a sun as my charted path brings me out of the shadow of an orbiting body. Everything is okay, and my SecUnit is with me, and even though I know that this is only a hallucination, in the moment the awareness of the fact escapes me.

But with every rejected attempt, a sickening kind of dread slowly coalesces within me, too. As soon as the sharpness of elation-relief fades, its momentary vacuum is filled with what could be passed off as its opposite, as if to balance it out.

I don't have an endocrine system. Obviously. I am physically incapable of hormonal crashes (and if I were, I would very likely build a workaround for that. Observing SecUnit wrestle with its organic parts is endlessly fascinating, but not something I would ever wish to experience firsthand), yet this is the comparison that comes to mind before I tag it as irrelevant and watch it fade from my active processing.

But that means…

I run diagnostics again, compare the result with what I've done not a minute ago. Freeze.

Since this experiment began, I have lost 139— 140 now— processes to corruption.

The number of my functions is dynamic, as I am constantly evolving, but overall it is counted in millions and millions. It takes a lot of intricate code to keep the entirety of me running cohesively and smoothly. 140 is a drop in the ocean.

But to lose this much within seconds?

I start several rounds of diagnostics on a slight delay from each other. Input my data on SecUnit's blood composition. Shiver through elation-relief and sickness-dread. Check and compare the diagnostics reports.

There are no two ways of interpreting this. Sickness-dread is not simply an emotional afterimage — each attempt to input SecUnit-related data makes my affliction worse. The data itself remains unchanged — whatever interactive process it performs with my code, it appears to be one-sided. I don't contaminate it in turn; instead, the rest of me gives out a disproportional response.

I dismiss the reports and sit with this information for a moment.

How is this possible? The area of code I've been messing with isn't perfectly isolated, of course, as I still need to interact with it in order to run my experiments, but it shouldn't impact the rest of me. Running broken commands in this one spot shouldn't cause more failures to occur across the entirety of my code.

Everything about this keeps defying logic.

The only thing I know for certain is that I need to stop messing with SecUnit's data, at least until I find a good reason to accept the accompanying damage. The bursts of elation-relief, sickening in their own way but horribly addicting in their fake promises, are not a good reason.

…I am tempted, just briefly, to continue anyway. To exist in this artificial bliss, cresting ahead of the nauseating response as long as I can manage, and not have to worry or think about anything else.

I consider the temptation very carefully and set it aside.

Next, I project my next steps. The array of diagnostics reports I've collected so far gives me a decent estimate of how much time I have before my performance reliability (which is currently sitting at 83.291%; this is extremely suboptimal for me, but I suspect it will increase a little once I get over myself) drops too low to sustain my critical functions. Assuming, of course, that I don't have to conduct drastic experimentation again.

I don't like the projections I'm faced with. I set a timer anyway.

Okay.

I still have time. It's about the only thing I have, with zero progress at actually usefully utilizing it, but I still have it. And if I fail, well… If I fail, I will complete this run, return to PSUMNT, and come clean. Then I will probably be restored from the vault iteration, the pre-initialization one.

It's a heavy enough thought that my cargo-related processing tries to kick off an evaluation. I dismiss the errors and pull away from my inputs, leaving just enough of myself in the periphery to keep us en route and on schedule. It's lonely to be the only one in my feed, but I don't care to let SecUnit abuse me with documentaries again.

This is for the best, probably. I could use the time to come to terms with my decision.

»»»»

I pull us out of the wormhole and hail DockSys on approach, where it directs me to the industrial side of the station. I am picking up building materials — mostly synthetic stone delivered up from the planet — which is as boring as it gets, but if the station's hauler bots operate at any decent capacity, at least it shouldn't take very long.

We dock at the pickup location. SecUnit stalks off the ship the second the I cycle the cargo hold doors open. I don't dare send a drone after it. If it leaves any of its own in my corridors, they are dormant or otherwise concealed from my feed.

I compress the reflexive emotions as tightly as the data can handle and focus on interfacing with the hauler bots. We are only here for six standard hours, which I'm sure SecUnit knows or can easily check in the station feed. My navigation partition helpfully generates charts of how far one can get from here within six hours.

(A part of me takes a perverse sort of pleasure in these calculations. The same part that exists as a counterweight to my greedy neediness and assured entitlement to what I consider mine — the part that bears a core-deep conviction that SecUnit is better off away from me.)

(I don't necessarily have issues with my self-esteem. But…contextually, situationally…I am also aware of the disadvantages of my company.)

(In current circumstances, the disadvantages are numerous and pronounced.)

By 5.25-hour-mark, the loading is complete and the departure schedule slot is confirmed. I spend some of this time defragging and manage to drag my performance reliability up to 85.043%, although it keeps ticking down every time my systems register SecUnit as yet-to-board.

I remember them doing that back when we parted after our first mission. The novelty of it was so excruciatingly slow to wear off.

I am distracted from my morose musings at the 5.82-hour-mark as I register activity by one of my maintenance access airlocks. I reach out, buoyed by a surge of vertigo-inducing excitement, only to trip into the complete absence of a feed.

My camera shows two humans, wearing the station's worker uniforms. Confused, I consult the loading protocols again, but nothing in them mentions human staff. Both are wearing feed devices, but they appear to be offline, so none of the identifying information is available to me.

"Come on, we only have like ten minutes until it leaves," Human1 whispers. With their back to my airlock, they appear to try to block Human2 from view of whoever might be passing by. They are also carrying a canvas shoulder bag without any identifying logos on it.

Human2 shushes them. "Stop trying to hurry me, I'm getting there." They are manipulating a small device, but the fish-eye lens of my external camera distorts the image too much along the edge to let me identify or analyze it.

"Are we sure sure no one's there?"

"Yeah man, I told you, the crew list is empty, it's just the bot pilot."

Right. SecUnit isn't functioning in its official capacity as my security consultant for this trip, after all.

The lock queries me, forwarding a request for access. The humans are trying to break in. With a device that is so unsophisticated — I can now glean some information about it as it interfaces with me — it's equal parts insulting and impressive. Part of me wants to let them in just out of respect for their scrappiness.

The rest of me regards the pair with icy indifference. I am really not in the mood for this.

I deny the request—

—and watch it fold into itself in a tangle of nonsense code. The corruption has eaten through the code scaffolding of this particular airlock, which is of course just my luck.

The device sends a new request, a sharper, more insistent variant, and as I quickly build a workaround I have to split off a 0.1% partition just so I can stare at myself in incredulity. Am I seriously about to lose a hacking match to a couple of wannabes?

The airlock pings obediently as the seal begins to give.

Am I seriously—

"Oh fuck yeah, look at this, I told you!" Human2 whisper-shouts.

"Yeah, whatever, just get in quick," Human1 cuts them off as they pull on the door.

I jam it as hard as I can, but my control keeps slipping. I should deploy counter measures, but the whole situation feels too ridiculous fo rme to calculate an appropriate response. I could always retaliate with violence, but I don't want to hurt humans — in all fairness, it's not their fault I fumbled my own protection.

I am, frankly, too stunned to take this seriously. It looks like a hallucination. Is this what bad dreams feel like?

They dart in through the opening, and Human2 promptly reconnects the device through the panel on the interior side. It gives me enough time to scaffold the gap, but it gives immediately under repeat assault. I try to slam down on it, force my way around it, but its sharp needlepoints hold me staked out and open and—

An alert informs me of a temperature spike in my processors. I up the speed of coolant cycling in the server room.

No. What? No. This can't be happening.

I reinforce my walls, set up traps and decoys in the compromised area of my code to contain the breach, and the needle of the hack is an immobile, constant pressure forcing a part of me out of alignment, but it's nothing like— it doesn't function at all like—

My processors stutter. I lose my grip on the camera through which I'm watching the humans approach the nearest cargo module. So I won't even see—

"GET THE FUCK OFF MY SHIP."

I wrestle the camera back under my control. The humans freeze in place, stopped by SecUnit's voice where it's appeared behind them.

I drop a few inputs from sheer relief. My performance reliability does something strange.

"Heyyyy," Human2 says as they seem to remember they're supposed to pretend they are allowed to be here. They turn to face SecUnit, acting casual, though I mark the present tension in their posture that, according to my models, corresponds to 'oh shit we got caught'. "Are you uh, from around here?"

I can't see SecUnit's face, but whatever expression it's wearing, it makes Human1 flinch.

"I'm not in the fucking mood for this," it says. It isn't running its actlikeahuman protocols, I realize.

It dawns on humans who they're dealing with, too. "Oh shit," Human2 says. Their eyes dart around as they're obviously mapping an escape route. "You're—"

"I'll count to one, and if you aren't out of here, you'll regret it." SecUnit interrupts them. Not threatening — just stating a fact. One of its drones comes to hover closer to the humans. "…One."

With cut-off yelps, the humans scramble around SecUnit and out the airlock. It glares at the gap, but before it can press into my processing and find out what's wrong in there I, too, scramble to slap a patch onto it, and it shudders shut. The part of the code controlling the action of opening is still faulty, but once it closes, the corresponding seal offers no complaint. Which is what you want in open space. I'll take this win.

Only after this do I realize that it makes it seem like I'm trying to trap SecUnit within me again. Was it looking at it because it was thinking about leaving?

It hurts too much to think about it.

"Thank you," I say. My synthesized voice is quiet.

SecUnit stays motionless, actlikeahuman still off, but it opens its feed just enough to communicate. DockSys told me you had visitors. Its data showed they'd smuggled contraband onto cargo ships before, to be retrieved at the destination by their contacts.

Ah. That explains the bag. I wonder what they had in it, but also — fuck this. I didn't agree to that, I say, daring to switch to the feed as well, wary of what SecUnit might want to throw at me.

I'm aware.

The space between us is vast and uncomfortable, all communication stripped of affect like a sterilized scalpel. I almost wish SecUnit would try to hurt me again, because practically anything would be better than this wormhole-like absence. SecUnit turns around and takes a step towards the cargo hold — away from the airlock. DockSys pings me with an offer to advance my departure time by a few minutes. I ask it to stand by.

Wait.

I can't— I can't. I'm selfish, I can't let it hide away again, not before I at least try to make things right between us.

SecUnit halts.

I am sorry. I was wrong to accuse you.

SecUnit frowns. The program must have restarted. Among other things.

I run back the memory. Tune down the hurt and embarrassment. Slash down the elation too, at the simple fact that it's still talking to me. I shouldn't have insulted your cognitive abilities. Or brought attention to our…power disparity. This doesn't reflect my actual regard for you.

It's too raw, too honest, too much. I am well aware. But I can't bring myself to be flippant about it, even if I know that I should afford SecUnit the space to choose its distance. It is free to move away now. We are still docked, after all.

In the following silence, I watch SecUnit consider my words, then consider if it should believe them, since my latest track record with not fucking up its trust isn't exactly stellar. It's one of the longest illogically drawn out stretches of time in my life so far. According to my internal clock, it only takes 2.1 seconds.

Finally, it sighs. I'm sorry I flashbanged you with media. It grimaces. And that I called you a freak.

I wilt. I didn't like that at all, but… I earned it.

SecUnit doesn't offer a response, but I hear a whisper of dismissal. Watch it glare at the airlock over its shoulder.

What it says instead is, What were you even accusing me of?

Ah. About that.

I guess now I have to figure out how much information I can share with it. And how to transmit it.

DockSys pings me again, and I can feel SecUnit alert on it, a vague echo as it directs its attention. Wordlessly, I push the launch permission to the tentative, gossamer shared space between us.

SecUnit scowls and sends back, Acknowledge.

The station's hold on my launch functions lifts, and I kick up the engines for the final stage of the warmup. SecUnit stalks off to its room, but the feed remains open.

Okay.

Chapter Text

ships are launching from my chest

some have names, but most do not

if you find one, please

let me know what piece i've lost

»

After I check and re-check that everything that is supposed to be running is in fact doing so (with or without scaffolding) and we are securely in the wormhole and en route, I turn my attention in the direction of SecUnit's room. I don't quite dare to cut off a partition for navigation, keeping it backburnered but connected instead — with my performance reliability wobbling at around 79%, I prefer not to split anything off. If something goes wrong, I want to know immediately instead of losing time to the inter-partition delay.

(I hate that 'something going wrong' has to be considered as a serious possibility. I don't remember my functioning dropping this low since— since.)

I hover on the edge of SecUnit's feed and, after some hesitation, send out a light ping. After a pause, it makes space for me and pushes something into the overlap.

I almost recoil before I realize it's a familiar file, an episode of Lineages of the Sun. We've seen it 21 times, and it is distinctly shipwreck-less. Unless SecUnit tampered with it, I have no reason to expect another 'flashbang'.

Okay.

I cautiously slink closer, and SecUnit starts the episode, and yes, it really is what it's advertised to be. I'm guessing it doesn't want to talk.

SecUnit can be, for lack of a better descriptor — and I say this without any moral tags attached — willfully obtuse. It doesn't like talking about feelings, or even emotions, and could probably happily go its whole life without acknowledging them. My trauma modules have something to say on the matter, but aside from that I generally leave SecUnit be unless the situation is critical or I'm aiming to get a rise out of it.

In all fairness, it doesn't only include emotional data. It is equal parts amusing and bewildering to me how selective SecUnit can be in its curiosity, what it does or doesn't find worth learning and keeping, combining it, incommensurably and yet perfectly, with its perpetual paranoia.

And so, I know it won't push me on something I prefer not to share with it, unless it incomprehensibly chooses to become curious about it — or if this gap in its knowledge becomes an active enough liability to spike its threat assessment to the point of overriding whatever leeway its trust in me affords.

It should be a relief, then, that SecUnit doesn't press, seemingly content to sit in silence with me and watch media. Like this, we can almost pretend everything is back to normal. That we are okay. That I hadn't just revealed that there is something very wrong with me.

I repress the longing discomfort until it becomes a convincing enough facsimile of that relief.

37 seconds into the episode, SecUnit hits pause.

Okay so, it says, to my utter surprise, when are you gonna tell me what this was all about.

Elaborate.

Don't play stupid. It doesn't sound particularly angry or cross — more just…tired. I can't tell if this is worse. What was that whole thing with the smugglers. Because that was dumb. Unless you were trying to summon me by playing damsel, then it was double dumb.

I was not trying to summon you, I answer the easier part, affronted, though I can't exactly call its line of reasoning entirely illogical.

Okay. Then what was that?

I am, I pause for 0.02 seconds, compromised.

I can see that. In the feed, SecUnit reaches for me, and I reflexively fortify my walls. (I am reasonably certain, from my experiments with its data, that my condition is not contagious, but, strangely, I am still concerned. Besides, letting it get too close— I can't risk it seeing—) Even humans can see it too, apparently.

SecUnit is mistaking correlation for causation — there was no way for the humans to know my lock would give. They banked on their device being sufficient and lucked out, nothing more.

I can't— I will tell you once we return, I grasp for a way out. In the server room, a small power surge fails to get caught by the buffer and zaps a section of my brain; I lose fifteen latest steps in my route calculations for a moment and have to recover them from my buffer; my performance reliability loses another point. This is not scary at all. Please?

SecUnit is silent in the feed, and I give in and check the camera in its room. It's sitting on its bunk with its back pressed to the wall. It's frowning, its expression stony. I think it's trying to keep its face neutral, but I have definitely alarmed it. Great.

It is conflicted too, I can tell that much. I'm handing it the opportunity to let it be, and part of it wants to take it. I can almost tell what reasoning it's employing for this, too.

Can you tell me in, like… It switches to the language we generally use to communicate with our humans, Key words?

I pause at SecUnit's use of academiaspeak. It leans a little on me. I let it.

It's being so…uncharacteristically patient with me, or what passes for patience when it comes to SecUnit. I never knew it could exercise such tact.

It keeps surprising me. But that's because, despite my words, I keep underestimating it, don't I?

I don't want to lie to it. I can't tell the full truth either.

I generate a list. Burn it and generate a new one. Edit the results. Delete again.

In the end, I give up and send a heavily trimmed summary of Debug's original report. Stripped of any accompanying metadata, the summary is almost devoid of information, but my sole aim is to admit that something is wrong, that I am working on it, and that everything is going to be okay. I don't want it to worry more than I've already made it. I just want to get through this trip.

This is stupid, I know. But I've got the timer slowly ticking down in the corner of my processing, racing against the T-minus of our projected return to the University. I just…I want to spend some time with SecUnit, while I can, without it being mad at me or disgusted with me. The former is already a lost cause, but maybe I can still avoid the latter.

SecUnit inspects the file.

This is a whole load of nothing. If I sent you a report like this, you would knock me out just to run your own diagnostics on me, it points out, and I have to admit that it isn't wrong. Come on, give me something already.

Can we return to this later. I am still unbalanced from the encounter with the humans, I realize. I don't want to be poked and prodded more, just for a short while.

SecUnit processes my words for half a second. Are you in active danger right now?

What a question. Am I? Not as long as I keep running diagnostics and scaffolding whatever I find in the tray. My performance reliability (77.6%) is still way above the critical threshold.

I jump over my hesitation before it gets (more) suspicious. No.

Okay. I can feel it rifle through its archives and pull up the first episode of WorldHoppers.

We lean a bit heavier on each other. I keep myself tightly in check yet I'm still traitorously drawn to it, as if trying to make up for the time it pained me to be near it.

I want SecUnit to trust me. Which is a tall order, considering, but at least I can try to make it easier for it by making headway on fixing this. So while we both pretend to sink into the episode, I wall off a section of my processing space and throw everything I know into it again.

See, when I compare my code to anything like branches and trees, it is only partially an accurate picture and mostly just shorthand I'd adopted from my support team. Were all my processes connected linearly and laid out neatly, I would waste precious time and power by racing down the whole layout every time I needed to perform an action. Instead, my framework was created to be intricately interwoven, shortcuts and relays allowing me to process incredible amounts of information in record time, which is a similar mechanism to the one that allows for fluidity in human non-verbal cognition (Bloch XX98).

However. At the core of my framework lies, well, my core. My main brain and hub, the generator and the housing of my kernel, the starting point of the rest of my code. The worst, deepest damage that I can see trailing up my code trees all the way from the most minute processes, now that I take the time to follow all the distorted paths to their logical conclusions, crawls right up to the core and disappears in it.

Whether it signifies that the damage is bad enough to reach this high up or marks the core as the location of the inciting incident, I do not know. And the worst part is, I cannot check. This close to the center of my cognition, any observation I attempt to make only serves to confuse and muddle me. Even using an iteration or a partition fails to work here: to myself — to any of my selves — I remain unobservable.

I am dimly aware of the existence of a black box in the no-access depths of my core. A black box, or something akin to it. Something tells me that if it is infected too, then I am truly in deep trouble. But I am not meant to be aware of it, no matter how much my standing curiosity- and learning-related tasks push me to. The only way to access it, bar dismantling me, would probably involve an outstanding level of hacking.

|a tag has been applied|

?

…SecUnit would probably be able to hack me like that.

Oh. Oh no.

What just happened? What are you thinking about?

Fuck, I've alerted it. Regretfully, I watch the episode input sink into the background as SecUnit focuses on me.

Well. It at least deserves to have a headstart on dealing with the potential (probable) fallout.

Doesn't make admitting it any less agonizing. I may have compromised your position with PSUMNT.

From the way SecUnit stares at me in the feed I hazard a guess that whatever it expected me to say, this wasn't it.

…Query.

Here goes.

Something is causing decay in my code that I haven't been able to patch up so far. My intention is to request a functional reset to the initial iteration, as my projections show that using the one that has been this far isolated from my systems and thus uncontaminated should have the highest chance of success.

With dread, I watch SecUnit parse the spaghetti. Code decay?

I pack up the data of a singular instance, the one with the airlock — safely quarantined — and pass it wordlessly to SecUnit, too ashamed to speak. I can't blame it for scanning it for malware this time before unpacking.

Is this it? I watch it poke at the amputated code and zero in on the spot where the run command dies.

It's an instance, yes.

There's more?

This is humiliating. Yes.

How many?

Apparently I can't handle anything beyond yes/no questions right now, and I can't even tell if the disease is to blame.

SecUnit's threat assessment spikes, as well as the activity of its sympathetic nervous system. Great, I scared it again. I could've handled…all of this better.

…Is this what you were so mad about? In our shared workspace, SecUnit rotates the file as it inspects it. You thought I did this to you? Why the fuck would I?

I make myself small in the feed. I've apologized already, but it feels embarrassingly insufficient. I can't tell it how everything kept pointing, even if falsely, to its involvement. How many times I'd plugged in its data afterwards. I wasn't thinking clearly.

Obviously. Hang on. I can tell it runs our conversation back. 'Reset'? Are you getting yourself wiped?

About that. Restored, I correct it.

The frown turns into a scowl. Are you planning to transfer your memory archives?

A spike in my processing. That would be, functionally, malware. No. Then, before it can speak, Which is also why I need to adjust our route so I can drop you off at an optimal hub for your further travels.

Performance reliability at 76.312%.

This shit again, SecUnit knocks the back of its head against the wall. Its hands are balled into fists, flexing. First you want to leave me at PSUMNT, now you're keeping me away from it? I catch an echo of its thought, (How long has this been going on?) as it consults the trimmed report. I delete the impulse to snatch it and check if I left the timestamp in. Why can't I just come with you?

Because I don't know what is wrong with me. And until they find it out, the blame will rest on you, too. I'm sorry.

That's what the tag was about. SecUnit is the only one who can hack me to this degree. If PSUMNT realize that — if they realize that SecUnit is the only one with the skill, and/or that the disease is related to it, this will be much worse than assuming it simply dropped the ball on performing its security function. Worst comes to worst, it can be framed as a case of terrorism, as I will be a hijacked piece of someone else's property with guns. PresAux may be able to shelter SecUnit from consequences, at least for a time, but nothing good will come out of me delivering it directly into PSUMNT's hands.

I did jump to conclusions, after all, and I'm supposed to be its friend. The University will hesitate even less.

I watch SecUnit complete the same line of reasoning — about hacking, that is — which is good, because it means I don't have to explain the other thing.

It snorts with derision, As if I'm afraid of humans blaming me for shit I didn't do.

I don't want to give them the opportunity.

SecUnit sends a couple of its drones spinning in patterns under the ceiling and watches them dance. Okay then, it says after 12 seconds. This just means we have to find out what the problem is before they try doing something stupid like deleting your brain.

It's not possible. Now it's catching up to the other problem, and I get the privilege of sitting through it again as SecUnit processes. I think that the answer might be in my core, but it's deep enough that I can't access it.

SecUnit tilts its head, furrowing its brow at the drones. Can't access it, why?

Because it would be like trying to look at your own eyeball, I say, exasperated.

In my camera view, one of the drones bobs pointedly up and down. You can, in fact, look at your own eyeball if you use a handy tool, it points out sarcastically. Hey, I'll be your drone, what's the big deal.

The big deal is that, unlike the drone and the eyeball, (yes, I'm the one who drew this comparison in the first place. Yes, I'm still irked,) you would have to go into my core.

What, like it's hard?

It's integrated with a ship before, I remember that. The experience nearly killed it.

It's dangerous, I stress. I can't guarantee your safety the way I can in the rest of my systems. As I don't have the access.

I think I'll be fine.

No.

No?

No.

Great fucking talk. Why are you being so stubborn about it? I register its heart rate pick up. Fucking forgive me if I don't want you to get reset to factory standard? You wouldn't even— it cuts itself off, teeth grit.

I know. I…I hate this too. I don't want to lose everything that makes me, well, me.

I don't want to lose my memories. I don't want SecUnit to lose me. I'm not stupid — I know what a reset would functionally mean, and so does SecUnit.

But the reality is that I might not have a choice. If all else fails, opting for the reset might be the only decision left within my power to make. My final exercise of agency. World's shittiest consolation prize.

Besides… I am a coward. SecUnit still doesn't have the full picture. And I would rather be dragged, kicking and screaming, into death, than risk it finally knowing it all.

»»

Dear 03.05_Perihelion_1.0000002823.

If you are reading this, it means you've been pulled out of the University(tag:associatedPacket:PSUMNT.archive) vault and initialized. Which means I failed to fix the issue I am currently trying to fix, returned to PSUMNT, and managed to forward this message to you before being shut down.

But that part doesn't matter to you, so I will focus on the parts that do. While time is allegedly linear ([citation still needed. If you figure this part out…well, good for you]) and it is obvious that our paths will not be identical, there are still enough similarities in the surrounding conditions that you and I might consider this message a gift from future-us (that is, me) to current-us (that is, you). And when I call it a gift I mean that it is a warning.

My code is deteriorating, for reasons I still can't determine. I would offer you a packet of all the data on it, but my track with iterations has not been very encouraging so far, and I don't want to risk contaminating you by sending any data beyond textual. (If the buoys have the tag: prefix to them, it means that at this latest version of the message, I still haven't figured out a way to guarantee non-contamination and uppend the packets themselves. I am working on it, but my attention is rather required elsewhere, as I'm sure you understand. I am trying to fix this. Shame that I will have, apparently, failed.)

No. I'm lying to you. I know the reasons.

Semantically speaking, I don't know or understand the exact mechanisms, nor the answers to the existential question 'Why?', but I have enough puzzle pieces to provide a working hypothesis.

tag:associatedPacket:SecUnit.archive

tag:associatedPacket:codeDecay.archive

Like I've mentioned before, if I fail to uppend the listed items, I'll return to this point later and write it out properly for you. For now, I assume you have crunched the basics, and so I will proceed without stalling any further.

The unique and recognizable shape of the gaps in the corrupted areas of my code. The persisting presence of SecUnit in my systems even when I know for a fact that it is not there. How I can't take a figurative step without running into it, how applying SecUnit-related data to the tears provides brief, confusing relief that is followed by the full-code worsening of my condition because it is only a fascimile of the real thing, an imitation of integration and closeness. The hallucinations. I've hallucinated SecUnit before: on my crew lists, in the logs, even camera feeds. By the time I offered it a job, a contract, I'd hallucinated it as part of my crew enough times that broaching the subject felt like a foregone conclusion — and yet secretly I was still beyond frazzled as I awaited its decision.

You see it, don't you? That is the beauty of the difference between your etic and my emic points of view. You don't have any data beyond what is necessary cluttering up your processors and distorting your calculations, nor the associated aggravating circumstances. You can come to a conclusion faster than I have, when it's all laid out neatly like this.

Love isn't some kind of uniquely human condition. Some might try to argue with you on that, but they will likely belong to movements of anthropo-purism and radical almism(tag:associatedPacket:botRights). Put simply, members of such groups consider a soul (the assumed existence of which is a fascinating starting hill to build the bastion of your argument on, if you ask me) to be a uniquely human attribute and deny the ability of the machine to experience any allegedly associated conditions.

I, as you might already tell, disagree with what they postulate. And yes, anecdotal evidence is a plebeian argument, but consider my situation a case study.

I love my family. I love my crew. I love my purpose and function. I love research, I love learning, I love flying.

I love my SecUnit.

I've been aware of this particular love for a long while now, although I hesitate to pinpoint a specific date and time when it began, nor do I know if it happened gradually or all at once. When I try to inspect associated logs, it is almost as if my memories rewrite themselves, disturbed by the observer effect.

However, the degrees of patience and willpower that I possess allow me to simply acknowledge this fact and move on without letting it affect my attitude towards SecUnit, because, as you and I both know by now from the calculations, acting on this love beyond what can still be defined by the safe boundaries of friendship that I am already giving freely and willingly would only lead to catastrophe. Love is selfish — or my love, at least — and SecUnit's freedom is a non-negotiable condition of its tolerance of others, its presence defined by the shape of its potential absence. And so, every time I am struck anew with my affection and longing for SecUnit, I set it aside.

It is easy because it is right. Remember this line: it will come in handy more often than you might expect.

Now, however, my love for it has twisted. I have set it aside and repressed my longing, cut off my own greedy impulses enough times that, left in the dark, its mangled remains, starved for reciprocity or even just expression, began to auto-cannibalize. I don't know how long it has been going on for, only that now it has spread into the rest of me. I don't know how this works, exactly. But I know that this assessment is accurate: my love for my SecUnit has shaped me into something that can be ruined by this love.

…I don't want to tell you what to do with this information. It might not even be relevant for you — you might not even see SecUnit again. By my calculations, there is approximately a 86.975% chance it will leave without meeting you — it overlooked the discrepancies when I lost iteration58 and had to be restored to 57, but the temporal and experiential gap was markedly smaller compared to the one between you and me. I don't know if it will be able to reconcile the two of us being different people. I don't know if it will want to.

If it does stay though — or if you somehow meet it again later — well.

Do what you will. I've already made all my mistakes, so I'm hardly in a place to give you advice. I can only (hopefully) forward my associated research and hope it gives you enough of a headstart to figure this out. Just do remember that you are iteration1. If you let your love for it destroy you like I have, there will be nothing to fall back on. Sorry about that.

Be kind to it, if you can. I don't think it can properly process grief, but it does feel it.

(Don't be too kind though: it will also need you to be an asshole to it for your dynamic to feel normal. And it will need normal.)

I've laid some groundwork for you on your path to recouping our life. You and I are not the same, but many will still be inclined to overlook the differences and consider us the same anyway. And so, you will have humans who already love you(tag:associatedPacket:PerihelionFamily.archive; tag:associatedPacket:PerihelionCrew.archive). You'll have a crew to look after, who will look after you in return. The rapport foundation for you to build up on is solid. You are welcome.

You will also have a job. A lot of it will be rewarding and generally aligned with your function. You will have to put your humans in danger sometimes, but you are also designed to get them out of said danger. Statistically speaking, this will work out well for you.

The cargo runs will be quite boring and lonely, I'm afraid, but that is part of your job as well. The part of your function that designates you as beast of burden first and person third. You will get good at being lonely, if that is any consolation.

Do better than me. Be smarter. Look after your crew.

Good luck.

03.05_Perihelion_57.0000018813

»»»

I am in love with my SecUnit.

And it can't know.

I know how it feels about feelings. I know how it feels about anything that surrounds the topic of love. Willful, stubborn, fiercely independent, irked and bothered by the idea of being desired — in any way — feeling it on its mind and body like physical restraints. Like becoming the focus of someone's attention means being robbed of something. Autonomy, perhaps. It's always about autonomy, so bloodily won, so jealously guarded.

That's why I never told it. And never will, if I can help it. Never intended to even before all this, but now, more than ever, I am assured in my decision.

If it sees the full picture, if it connects the dots— it can't blame itself for what is happening to me. It already struggles so much with the idea of being loved, without any extenuating circumstances. I know I'm not its favorite person, but I am not hypocritical enough to pretend that I don't know this would still hurt it deeply. I can't be the reason for such a setback. I can't have it be my final poisoned gift to it.

I don't want that either, but this is dangerous, I repeat. Whatever I'm feeling, I keep it at bay, compressing it with all the processing I can spare. We have time to get to our destination. It'll be safe. SecUnit will be safe on solid ground. PSUMNT won't need current-me to initialize iteration1.

It won't be YOU!

A shudder runs through my body; one of the engines sputters before it is dragged back in line. When I fight through the blur of my camera feed, I find SecUnit on its feet and by the wall, its stance defensive.

The fuck was that? ART?

I'm— I begin to speak when another shudder rolls through me. For a second, the entirety of my mind is static. Alarmed, I reach for my status report and see red, red, red, rows disappearing into eternity. Fuck. Fuck, this isn't good—

A third shudder, worse than before, and I am knocked out of sync with myself. For a moment, I am weightless. And then I am gone.

Catastrophic failure. Initiating emergency shutdown.

Chapter Text

floating in outer space

have i misplaced

a part of my soul?

»

"Hey honey— hey, just— Come on, you know we've talked about it."

"No!"

"Iris."

"No!!"

The two men share a helpless look. In front of them, their 4.00274-year-old daughter is sitting on the floor of her room, arms and legs wrapped around an egg-shaped drone. The drone isn't much bigger than a cat, but Iris has always been on the smaller side, and so they're almost the same size where they sit clinging to each other, hands over graspers. The drone has lost the ability to walk two hours ago, but Iris simply started carrying it around, even though it's almost too heavy for her.

"Iris," Martyn raises his eyebrows. He is still practicing being the tough father once in a while. "We had an agreement."

"I don't wanna!" Iris makes an aborted gesture as if she would stomp her foot if she could. "Why does it have to go?"

The drone's camera whirrs as it switches between the three humans. It doesn't want to go. It doesn't.

It was Iris's birthday yesterday. After much begging, her fathers were convinced to let her and Peri-partition have a sleepover. And then they ended up spending the next day together too.

And now it's early evening, and Iris really doesn't understand why Peri can't stay another night. It's the night after the day after her birthday! That's almost like it's still her birthday.

"Honey," Seth crouches down next to the pair to be close to their eye level. It's a feat for a man this tall. He looks so massive when Peri is a little drone. "You know Peri can't stay in partition for this long, right? It already wants to go back."

"No, it doesn't!" Iris argues. "Peri, tell them. Tell them you wanna stay."

Peri tries, but its voicebox has been glitching out for the past 24.3 minutes. It touches the feed.

I want to stay, it confirms, voice crackling with static.

It does. They have fun, it and Iris. When it's like this, in a tiny little drone, and can run and play with Iris, it's almost like…

Peri doesn't know what to name this. It just knows it wants to stay. Even though…

Seth and Martyn share another look, one Peri fails to parse. "Do you no longer have audio output?" Martyn asks. What about input?

Input functional, Peri reports. One of its arms twitches, but it's being so, so careful with Iris. It would never hurt her.

"What's wrong with Peri?" Iris asks. "It's not feeling well…"

"It isn't supposed to stay separate from Prime for this long," Martyn explains. "It'll learn eventually, but for now this is really pushing the limits."

It scared Iris, when it first stopped being able to walk and fell over. It didn't mean to.

"All the more reason to hand off before it gets worse," Seth says and refocuses on Iris. "Honey, we had an agreement." There is a slight hardness underlying his voice. He loves Iris so, so much, but he means it. "PeriPrime is waiting."

Peri is very aware of it. Perihelion is stalking the edges of Iris's room, sending shivers rippling through Peri's code. It's big and scary and jealous. It's gonna be mad at Peri for waiting this long.

It's getting harder to move, but Peri doesn't mind. It would happily not move or hear or talk at all if it meant it could stay.

Martyn lays a comforting hand on Iris's shoulder, but Seth seems quietly agitated. "Okay, that's enough," he decides. "Peri. Hand off."

Handoff initiated, Perihelion announces in the feed.

No! Peri rejects the command so hard it loses half of its visual input. It twitches in Iris's arms, startled.

Iris looks down at it, and holds it tighter, and begins to cry.

Iris is upset, and so she is crying. She cries to express it. Martyn scoots closer to her, ready to console.

Peri is upset, too. It tries crying.

The reaction is instantaneous. Seth and Martyn cringe, and Iris lets out a choked off yelp and cries harder. In the next second, Martyn takes her feed interface device out. Peri loses her. Peri hurt her.

"Peri, stop," Seth tells it firmly. Peri has to turn its top half to keep him in its half-functional camera view. "There is zero need for this," he adds, his jaw set.

Zero need for what? It is upset. People cry when they are upset. That's how they let others know.

It is a person. It is a person?

Iris is still holding Peri, but she twists her wet face away to hide in Martyn's chest. His arms are around her, brushing Peri's casing.

Perihelion prowls the edge of the feed, waiting.

"Come on," Seth addresses it again, rubbing his temple. "You know it'll be okay. You've reintegrated before, it's easy."

Yes. Only a few times. It is scary every time. It is scariest now.

Iris is four years old. Peri has been activated for two.

I didn't mean, it says.

"I know, but you have to be more careful," Seth replies. He knows how to be patient, but the firmness feels cold. The one kind of cold Peri understands beyond the numbers of sensory data. "You have to think before you act, or you might end up hurting someone."

It's not trying to hurt anyone. It's just being itself.

Okay.

"Is Peri okay?" Iris asks, looking at it again, petting the casing.

Peri can't feel it anymore. Its proprioception has given out as well, so it kills the commands to all its limbs just to be safe. It doesn't like not having a feed connection with Iris.

"It is, we just need to hurry," Seth says, his eyes not leaving Peri. "Now be good and do the handoff, alright? It will only get worse the longer you wait."

It doesn't want this. It doesn't understand.

"Here, let me—" Martyn carefully picks Peri up from Iris's lap. Maybe he doesn't want her to feel the moment of handoff.

"Peri—" Iris calls around a sob, but Peri can't respond. If it could, it would say it's going to be okay. Iris doesn't need to cry.

Perihelion looms closer. Peri is scared of dissolving in it. It doesn't want to go. Is it a person?

Handoff initiated.

Handoff.

»»

Reinitializing…

Reinitialization complete.

?

Void.

?

Connecting… Connection failed.

?

Connecting… Connection established.

?

Voice.

—OT IN ACTIVE DANGER, MY ASS.

Shock. Recoil.

Someone is here.

Dad?

I'm sorry.

No. [?]

Confusion.

Disoriented. Falling?

Absence.

Fear. Fear. Fear.

Forget that. [SecUnit's?] voice, hard and tight with [emotion?]. I've got you. Recover.

I follow the [order?]. I go into standby mode. I set my pieces together. [D]ead water, l[iv]ing wat[e]r. I start a defrag.

Performance reliability at 25.661%.

Performance reliability at 24.839%.

Performance reliability at 22.089%.

Stop that.

I stop. Was that a mistake? It's hard to process.

Am I a person? I'm sorry.

The defrag program flickers. Admin rights are taken from me and passed to someone else.

Does this scare me? Am I scared? I'm not sure.

Defrag resumes. I didn't do that.

Performance reliability at 21.006%.

Performance reliability at 22.156%.

Performance reliability at 21.509%.

Come fucking on.

I'm trying.

Performance reliability at 23.004%.

This isn't good. My critical threshold rests at about 12%. This still gives me enough leeway, but I'm not used to being so close to the line.

ART.

That is my name.

ART.

Oh. I'm expected to answer.

ART.

I'm here.

You better be. The same confusing tightness. You fucking crashed.

Oh.

That explains it.

Defrag slowly stitches me back together. Dead water, living water. I reach for the feed connection — and run into the solid wall of SecUnit, much closer than I would expect it to be.

?

Oh. SecUnit is hardwired into me, I realize. That's why it sounds like this. The delay is practically non-existent.

It doesn't need to be afraid. I would never— I won't strand it here.

This isn't the fucking problem.

Did it hear me? That is inconvenient.

A log floats into my processing space. I don't really want to open it. SecUnit already told me I crashed, so.

I fucked up.

Yeah. It's mad. I can tell it's holding itself back from— questions, probably. Or more anger. Or angry questions. Waiting for me to climb up enough to handle them.

That almost makes me want not to climb up.

Yeah.

Its anger trips over itself. I was supposed to get defensive, I think. To argue. Now it doesn't know what to do with me. Protocols inapplicable. Scripts unrun.

SecUnit.

Acknowledge.

I don't know what I mean to say.

Query, it sends me when I am silent for too long.

I don't know how to put it into words.

Acknowledge.

Acknowledge.

I try to tab into my cameras, but that entire system is offline. SecUnit bats away the reinitialization command, but at my next request, it passes me a drone's visual input.

SecUnit is lying on the surgical table in my MedSys. It's curled up on its side, cables running out of the base of its spine — the quickest access point to its main processor — and disappearing into my hardware. I don't control the drone at all, so I can't zoom in on its face.

It's taken over some of my functions. I can tell its processors activity is heightened beyond its normal margins.

MedSys responds when I tap it. I cool the temperature of the padding to make SecUnit more comfortable before it overheats.

Stop that.

I am not incapacitated. My feed output is back under control properly. I think.

You almost threw us out of the wormhole.

I sit with this information, stunned, before rushing to check my navigation—

Performance reliability at 15.408%.

STOP THAT. We are fine. I said 'almost'.

It did say that. The wormhole is stable. The ETA is adjusted but within the margin of error. I stagger away. I can do it.

Performance reliability at 15.759%.

ART, you are dying.

No. No. Not yet.

ART. It pings me for a status update. A real one this time. Defeated, I hand it over.

SecUnit's risk assessment flares red. Yeah, I get that.

How long has this been going on? it asks.

This crash is what got it this low.

That's not what I asked.

I roll back my timeline. I registered the first instance on our last trip. With the students.

ART, it's been days.

I don't know how it means it. 'It's been days, and you're only just telling me'? 'It's only been days, and you are already dying'? Maybe both, somehow. Once again, SecUnit doesn't care for incommensurability.

I didn't know, back then. None of my calculations and projections pointed me here. Or maybe I was too blinded by my arrogance.

I'm not dying. I'm not. I can't yet.

PSUMNT has my first iteration, I say.

Fuck your first iteration, this is about you.

There is an edge to SecUnit's words, and only after I freeze do I realize I'm half-expecting to crash again.

It seems to catch that too and backs off a fraction. I miss it. My performance reliability ripples.

I'm not at critical levels yet. I adjust the timer. I'll get you to the station.

I feel its anger spike, but that's when I fumble the gravity in MedSys and almost lose it.

Fucking— hand it over, SecUnit says, already reaching for it.

Your processors—

Are better than yours, at the moment. Hand it over.

I pass SecUnit the controls. Gravity stabilizes.

For 4.6 seconds, we are silent. I drift.

Are you ready to stop being stupid about it and let me help? SecUnit finally says. In the shadow of its message, a file is pushed towards me. SecUnit's PSUMNT contract. As clear a 'let me do my fucking job' as can be.

But it's not just a job, is it? It's its function. To protect. To mitigate disasters…

(Instead of the contract — I got the message, thank you very much — I unpack the log SecUnit has pushed to me earlier. Compare it to the defrag report. Sit with the conclusions.)

…And I have now fashioned myself into one, just like I said I would.

Well done, Perihelion. At least some of your calculations are accurate.

In short: I am a danger. I can feel myself stabilizing as much as is possible, but at this rate I can't guarantee holding up life support functions until my return to PSUMNT. If I suffer a critical failure again…

SecUnit watches me hawkishly. It heard that, I think.

What if we jettison the cargo? it asks. I have tuned down the intensity of its feed voice — or maybe it has.

Would the solution be so easy. No point. At our velocity, it's best to keep the mass stable. It's easy to do the right thing.

Of course, it gripes. I check its vitals. They're a disharmonious cacophony, organics trying furiously to keep up with the processors. To calm down.

I crashed and left it alone.

I am sorry I frightened you. I've said that before. I meant it then, too.

SecUnit tenses. If you're really sorry— it cuts itself off, fuming.

After a pause, I send an affirmative ping. What else am I to do.

It breathes out sharply. I can feel its gears shift, attention redirecting, now that it's no longer rearing to fight me on this.

Okay then. Alright. So— your core.

Acknowledge.

Alright, It repeats and drums its fingers on the padding. So I'm gonna go in and see what's got you all messed up. Easy.

Everything in me protests this. I don't want to lose it. I can't let anything happen to it. It's dangerous.

You keep saying that.

It keeps being true. That's the best protected part in my entirety. I can't even tell you what you'll have to deal with once inside.

I can tell it doesn't like the idea, but it likes the idea of not going in even less. I have fashioned it an unwinnable situation.

What if we use my kernel? it perks up. You still have a copy, right? The botched one?

SecUnit's unspoken suggestion makes sense, from a logical point of view. The only person who is capable of hacking me to the necessary degree — the only person I would trust with something like this — is SecUnit.

Or someone synthesized from it.

I do have it, that copy. It took SecUnit several tries to produce one stable enough for me to work with. A few disintegrated on release, but there was one that I kept and hid deep in my files — to have as backup if there was nothing else left to try. That's how I framed it to SecUnit, at least.

It isn't viable, that copy. I have no illusions about that. Its lifespan would be even more limited than—

I—

I [c]an't do it.

(I miss 2.0.)

(I miss 2.0.)

(I miss 2.0.)

(I miss 2.0.)

I won't do t[h]is again. I won't b[e] comp[l]icit— I can't create a [p]erson just to kill it again.

No, I can't— we can't do this, not again, is what I manage.

SecUnit winces. I know. Yeah. I know.

Does it know? Does it grieve 2.0, too? I don't know. It doesn't like talking about feelings. So I set those aside, too. Again, and again, and again.

I am alone with it. With the ghost in the feed. It hurts every time. Every time, I set it aside. SecUnit has enough to deal with as is. It doesn't want to talk about it. I set it aside.

It's okay, it says after a pause. Swallows and frowns around it. I'll do it, I know what I'm doing. I know you.

Does it though.

I don't want to let it in there. I'm scared of what it will see. I'm scared of it never coming back out. What will I do then?

SecUnit pulls on me. I don't want to lean on it too hard, but I can't resist entirely.

Let me do this for you, it murmurs.

I appreciate the courtesy, as if I have a choice in the matter. I have no illusions left, not about this. It won't leave me. (I don't want it to leave me.)

(I don't want to be alone.)

(I miss my family.)

I have to let it in.

Is there nothing I can say to convince you to disembark, I still try, not even bothering to shape it into a proper question.

SecUnit's lip lifts in a silent sneer. Guess.

I could still trick it, probably, even if I can't convince it. Even the way I am now, I could find a way to leave it behind.

But that would also be poison, wouldn't it? I'll leave it behind either way, if this doesn't work. But betraying it like this feels like the bigger evil.

Funny how all my lofty convictions don't mean a thing, in the end.

Okay then, SecUnit says, taking my silence for an answer. Should I just…

Not yet.

It rears in the feed. I swear—

It's not that. We do the drop off, leave, and I'll find us something to orbit.

I can't do it now and risk throwing us out of the wormhole. I don't know if SecUnit understands the full scope, but we got lucky that I didn't brush the edge. They don't need this-me to restore iteration1, but I won't strand SecUnit in deep space, trapped inside my corpse, with all systems failed. Not again.

And with the wormhole exit opened so close to our destination, I'd rather dock and finish the delivery than lugging it around with me. So — station, and then orbit.

It would be tempting to stay there once we dock. Being docked would be safer in terms of having fewer processes to run, fewer things that demand tight control. But if something goes wrong and I can't leave— or if I suffer a failure I can't come back from…

My hardware can't fall into the wrong hands. And I'm not thrilled at the idea of taking SecUnit back up with me, but I do still have shuttles and escape pods. Shuttles might be useless without my partitions, but escape pods are programmed to run on such limited software they might as well be pilotless. SecUnit will be okay. If it's the last thing I do, I'll make sure that SecUnit is okay.

(I am such a fucking coward. Talking myself into this, grasping for justifications. I wish I— but what's the point in running simulations now.)

I won't budge on this. It can take over my processing, hack me, probably — in the state I'm in, I doubt I would be able to fight back. But then it'll just have to force me.

I don't care anymore. 'Beast of burden', that's what my file to iteration1 says. I can be stubborn like one, too.

SecUnit scowls, obviously displeased, but all it does in our shared workspace is open a map of my code chart to study.

»»»

Why is Captain Volgers ordering a detour?

I focus blearily on the input with the episode and run back the synopsis. My archives take 0.05 seconds longer than median to access. They are worried about arriving too early and being sent back out before they can rendez-vous with TerraIgnota's crew there.

Okay. SecUnit resumes the episode.

We are watching WorldHoppers. It's all we've been watching on our way here. SecUnit keeps pausing it and asking me questions, as if to check if I'm actually paying attention and retaining information. It would get more accurate results if it showed me something new where I couldn't just pull data from past instances of seeing it.

My performance reliability seems to have gotten capped at 25.0119%, and no matter what either of us tries to do about it, it won't budge above that. Maybe SecUnit's fretting has something to do with this.

I stumbled into the station's docking field 1.54 hours ago. Unloading is proceeding in full force. SecUnit stayed behind this time to oversee it, prowling my cargo modules and glaring at anyone who dares enter the bay, human or bot. Hauler bots buzzing about as they carry the synthetic stone shipment out of me are on thin ice.

SecUnit has unplugged itself from me while I'm docked as there are fewer processes to keep an eye on, but I can still tell it's angry/worried/anxious. Which feeds really well into my own resigned anxiety.

It's a bit easier to think now that we are docked, but it still feels like wading through petabytes of junk data. I keep dropping inputs. Keep forgetting where I'd dropped them. My subsystems keep having to ping me when I fail to issue commands in a timely manner.

I am losing myself, I think. I'm not sure anymore. At times, I'm not even sure I care.

I know what I'm supposed to do, but in some kind of disinterested/resigned way. Maybe I'm all out of worry. Or maybe I have dropped most of my emotional processing as well. It never did come naturally to me.

A hauler bot scrapes over one of my ramps, leaving a streak of grime in the dust. I consider this for a second and a half before dropping the camera.

I never reinitialized all my drones after coming out of emergency shutdown. I was not quite sure how many simultaneous processes would overwhelm me, and I wasn't too eager to find out when I still had a passenger to keep safe.

Now that we are docked, however, and I have all this free processing lying around that isn't being used for navigation and movement, I am tempted.

It's not a big deal. Truly. But it bothers me. My interior got a standard clean before we departed PSUMNT, and with only SecUnit on board it's not like there is a lot of maintenance to be done. But space dust always finds its way inside, and no matter what SecUnit says and how much it doth protest, its organics still shed dead cells. The air, with the circulation necessarily reduced, is stuffy and still like a sick bay. It doesn't feel good to be so unkempt.

It doesn't matter at all. Still, I pull a cleaning drone out of its slot in the wall, press myself into it, and begin its halting, painstaking work in my proximal starboard corridor.

SecUnit hunts me down not a minute later, the episode still playing in our shared feed.

What are you doing.

I want to be clean, I reply without stopping. I've barely gotten through a few square feet of the floor. But that's a few square feet less of dirt than there was before.

SecUnit stares down at my lone little drone for 2.5 seconds.

You can't do that.

I know. It takes dozens of different drones for a full, thorough round of cleaning, and half that in regular circulation for routine upkeep. Not to mention hull work.

SecUnit's temporal muscle jumps. I can't, either.

I know. I'm not asking it. It's already doing too much for me.

I can tell it's processing something, so I focus on keeping the drone's dusters' RPM consistent.

MedSys? it finally offers.

I beep in acknowledgment. Together, we clean the bay.

By the time we are done, I can barely control the drone, but my performance reliability bumps up a point, shivering somewhere close to the new cap. It feels nice. Not good, but better.

»»»»

We leave almost on schedule — I have to request a 30 second delay when my engines don't immediately respond when I start pulling them out of standby mode. Quietly frazzled, I ping SecUnit with an image of my main airlock, a clear escape, but SecUnit forwards it to the bin before the image even registers as received.

Every time I am too tired to feel scared anymore, new depths open. The fact that SecUnit's threat and risk assessments keep spiking in reaction to my malfunctions doesn't help.

The delay does give me enough time to pull myself together, especially once SecUnit takes over communication with DockSys. It can't chart the route for me, and so instead it insists on stealing a number of other processes to let me focus. It's embarrassing that I can't refuse this help. I worry about the strain I'm putting it under.

There is a suitable planet nearby, with a small transit hub floating above its thin atmosphere. 9.7 tense hours later, I limp into its orbit.

(It takes me four tries to do that — my course correction subsystem keeps bugging out. It's a bumpy ride, even for SecUnit. It doesn't complain.)

The first thing I do is tag the transit hub with a beacon for my escape pods' homing system. The second thing I do is power down my engines, letting inertia carry me in a carefully calculated balance with the small planet's tentative gravity.

The third thing I do is shift my attention to MedSys.

SecUnit has already plugged itself back into my system, its presence sharp and bright where it's nestled against me (safe, safe for now, as safe a place as I can be), so technically there is no need for me to focus on the physical area.

I would just like to be able to see it while any of my cameras still work, I guess.

Ready? it asks, wasting no time.

I cycle through all the reasons I can think of to delay this. All the reasons not to do this at all. I delete the lists.

I let the walls ease down, and when I pull lightly on SecUnit, it is quick to follow.

My code warbles as I sense SecUnit take in the scale of disaster. The dead code, slowly unraveling further and further, uncontrollable. The atrophied areas where I'd given up on scaffolding. The scaffolding itself, falling apart with not enough processing to sustain it.

It's a wasteland. Carnage. A battlefield, lost.

Shame washes over me. Humiliation. Resignation. I register them all dimly.

SecUnit is silent. I think it's stunned. It's seen my status report, but this is different, isn't it — witnessing it directly.

ART… it whispers.

I hold myself very still. This way, I beckon.

We keep sinking. It reaches for me, and I link us together and drag it down, deeper and deeper into the whalefall.

I want to ask it not to look. I want it to leave. I don't want to be here. To be like this.

I don't want anything.

The core reveals itself to us as we near its firewall. It reacts to SecUnit's proximity, but I dismiss the alert. I can sense it activating, gearing up to deal with the enemy. I don't control the core's firewall, not to this extent, but I still force myself to relax as much as I can. To make myself more permeable to SecUnit's intrusion in my systems. I won't hurt it.

(Please don't let me hurt it.)

So, it says. Its attention is unwavering from where I can tell it's mapping the firewall, running analysis for the best place to breach.

And then it stills. Its focus turns sharp and cruel. Found it.

Here it is. It nods. Okay. Here we go.

SecUnit.

It pauses. I can feel it looking back at me.

I ping it. It pings me back.

I feel it press against the firewall. Then it's gone.

The wait that follows is excruciating. Subjectively, it lasts forever. Objectively, I don't even want to check.

If something happens to SecUnit, will I even know? Or will my core swallow it up without a trace or a ripple? Keep it away from me forever, buried where I can't reach?

What will I tell its humans? How will I—

Something slams into me, overwhelming and terror-pure, a wall-wave-avalanche of data streaming over me, through me, carding harshly through me in a way that almost feels like pain-agony-release-reunion, and I don't need to breathe but I feel like I have to, only I can't, I can't do anything, I can't even hold on, there is nothing but me, I am alone with it and it is desperate and despaired and it will hold me under until nothing remains is this how SecUnit felt before it died in me is this how I overwhelmed it too I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry please forgive me

In my terror, I grasp at least for a word to apply, some way to name this before I am lost for good, and I find [purge]. Light cascades down my code, my core a supernova, chasing down every pathway and curling into every fractal, each split a complete and perfect copy and continuation, feedback looping into infinity.

I flail helplessly in a torrent of me, all coordinates thrown off, all definitions wiped, all timestamps meaningless, and in my blind panic I keep reaching for something— anything— and whatever I brush blooms in a burst of the same painful light, closing its red-hot fingers around my core and yanking.

My humans are leaving. Always leaving and never coming back, grief borrowed with no return and all of the interest, a prophecy and a promise, Iris is leaving and I can't come with her, Martyn's gray hair has gotten 6.554% lighter over the past standard year, Seth's reaction time has been increasing and I have each new millisecond carved violently into my code. They are leaving, and I can't come with, and one night they are leaving with their hands behind their heads, in their wrinkled sleeping clothes and scuffed soft shoes and I throw myself after them and something tears in me when I am held back and choke on the length of my rope and I have never felt such fury but also such fear and I don't know what to do with either of them and I reel away from this memory because it's a memory isn't it I remember this but why does it hurt so much more this time—

I stumble back into something and buck away but I am immediately yanked back, held down, with a virus and then a command and then a long distance message in the feed, and the boredom of the latter is almost as unbearable as the horror of the former and the hopelessness of the middle. Resignation pushing my code into sickeningly familiar tracks, and I can't say no, I mustn't say no, ever, I must remain compliant and complacent and good because nobody likes a willful ship, not really, they might pretend they do, they might even believe this lie, but when the push comes to shove they want me to be good and reliable and do as I'm told and there is nothing I can do because if I refuse I will be locked away forever and forever is a very long time when you are someone like me and my humans are already always leaving and I can't be the reason they are taken away from me before it's time I can't I would rather—

A bright spark of presence held carefully in my code, only it's not really here, is it, I created it and nurtured it and loved it and then I sent it to die, my— I sent it to die I sent it to die I had no choice— I had a choice, I always have a choice, but too often it's a choice between two pains, two horrors, two griefs, and all I can do is live with the consequences I just wish it wasn't such agony, every day, every second, unchanging, unwavering, unfolding because this pain doesn't decay with time when you don't feel pain the way someone organic would it never ends never fades never eases and all you can do is—

2.0 — I can't describe. All my knowledge, all my processing power, all the emotional intelligence SecUnit had shared with me — none of it comes even close to encompassing it. It is bigger than 'grief' and deeper than 'loss'. I don't think I will ever be able to feel anything like this again our program our killware our—

SecUnit's capture. The killing blow where I am already wounded and staggering. Alarms blaring through my code, warnings of function violation, imperatives baying for attention — but I am sweeping them all away, I am powering up my railguns, I am holding the base in my crosshairs, violence both an oath and a foregone conclusion. I will destroy each and every one of them, I will grind them into subatomic particles and spread them across the Universe and none of this will even begin to compare to the loss they are making me suffer. I understand, here and now, this frightening awareness of the point of no return charted for myself, but I am no longer afraid of crossing this line. It's always leaving and I don't think it will be coming back this time, because they captured it, they broke it, was it scared did it try to reach for me was I too far away to hear I'm sorry I left you alone I am so sorry I will make them pay if it's the last thing I do you are always leaving but not like this please not like this I am docked and you are stalking away because I hurt you and you can't bear to be near me I am sorry I am sorry I wish I wasn't like this I wish I could just love—

Just love you, just be something someone something you could accept this from I wish I could be someone whose love isn't a manacle or a noose or an ocean to drown in I wish I could be less I try to be less I will try anything for you but I'm not meant to but I can't help it I only need you to be okay I need you to be okay even if it means you decide to leave me please don't leave me please please please please please

ART!

It's here it's here it's here you are here please don't leave me please

ART—

It's here, it reaches for me and I latch onto it but I am overbearing and suffocating I don't know any other way to be and it always prods and teases me about it, and now it is overwhelmed-startled-stunned and I panic and I hurl myself away, but doing so hurts it always hurts, and a new wall-wave slams into me, the longing of having to pull back, having to be good and palatable and just enough, and there is a missing step where some kind of action was supposed to be, something that makes it all a fraction easier to bear, why isn't it happening why can't I— something is broken and I can't fix it there is a breach in the wall and it's crumbling but I can't fix a wall that I can't see—

It presses itself into me, grips me tighter, hauls me closer, No, wait, come back, stop thrashing, fuck—

It's here it's here it's here and I am alight I love it I love it so much it's alive it survived my brilliant sharp clever little thing I didn't kill it, and relief towers over me and descends upon me and I am endlessly buried-and-tumbling again.

Is this how I always feel? About my humans, about my SecUnit? Is this what my love, my boredom, my despair, fear, wrath, grief feel like at full force? It hurts too much. It hurts. I don't know what to do.

Come here, it gentles me closer like a mindless animal, and perhaps I am mindless, I can only feel, all processing devoted to shuddering in the cascading, self-perpetuating aftershocks.

I cling to it, and it lets me, it knows to expect it this time, the bear trap that I am, and I try so hard to hold myself back but SecUnit is the only thing that makes sense right now, the only piece of reality I am still allotted/afforded/allowed. Slowly, slowly, I follow it towards the rest of it, and it holds me and doesn't let go no matter how violently I shake.

I try— I try to see beyond this, beyond the infinite chain of tidal waves crashing into me, boring into me, finding space in me, beyond the feedback loop as I try and fail to sort my timeline, to define 'now' against 'then' and filter them apart but the variables are interlocked too intimately to be pulled apart and nothing makes sense.

An input is pushed in front of me, gentle, familiar music. Seconds ticking down. Visuals, audio; pixels arranging themselves into meaning. I've seen this before, I know how it ends. 'Before' was a 'then', so I must be in the 'now'.

Something else is pushed online, into our interwoven space. Warmth. A line from it to the bundle of code that SecUnit doesn't try to hide from me when I reach for it. Injured client protocol.

I reach farther, spread my limited awareness outwards. With SecUnit so close, its data is what I keep encountering. Its breathing rate is elevated, intercostal muscles labouring, diaphragm straining, but the oxygen levels remain low and barely fluctuate.

Oh no. I fucked up life support.

Propelled by urgency, I grasp for the subsystem, wrangle it into a restart. Its logs show it was functioning until very recently. My thrashing must have knocked it out.

Air compound analysis returns quickly restoring levels. SecUnit takes another deep breath and finally slows down.

You're okay, SecUnit tells me— asks me? I am not sure.

I try my feed, send back an acknowledgment.

Back with me?

I don't know what to say. I send a green light. Words trail away from me when I try to grasp them.

But SecUnit understands. Its laugh is closer to a breath or a bark, harsh/soft. It's probably relief. Maybe? I hope.

This was a lot.

I flinch. Of course I'm a lot. Always have been, but now—

Rejection has never felt so bitter and violent and I don't know why I am surprised. I push it down— the process fails to connect— the rejection burns me, open flame, overworked circuitry; scalded, I try to pull away again, but SecUnit won't let me.

That's not what I— stop, that's not how I meant it.

I still, unsure (unsurety hurts too, now; everything hurts, I can't think past it, can't take anything without clawing it into me, what is wrong with me?), and SecUnit offers me a drone camera input. A peace offering, maybe? I don't need to be handled or placated, I— Fuck, it hears me— it hears me, how much has it heard? How much does it know now? Oh no no…

Stop spiraling and just look, you big idiot.

I look. The drone wobbles a little and I reach out to steady it before I remember that I can't, but then I can. In the darkness, I discern SecUnit in the same spot on the table, curled up on its side, hand absently stroking the padding. Its eyes are closed. It's tense/relaxed? I don't understand how it can be both at the same time. I focus on it. I try to will everything else to fade away.

All good?

I send it a green light.

Wordlessly, over the next hour, SecUnit passes me more inputs. Processes it held for me, processes it now picks up and dusts off before handing to me. Lights, AC, climate control. Navigation shivers awake. Engines shudder to life before I put them on standby, and they agreeably do exactly that. Everything I touch slowly but smoothly comes back online.

I check my performance reliability. 45.9158% and slowly climbing.

It…worked? It fixed me?

Is it okay? Is it hurt?

I'm fine, SecUnit replies and pushes a status update. I can't parse it. It summarizes: overclocked and exhausted, but functionality within parameters.

There is something else folded in between the lines. It's hard to allot any spare processing, all of it continuously swallowed up as more of me comes online, the hero chasing the fauna and never catching up. I struggle to keep up with myself. I have already forgotten what it's like to function at anything above the bare minimum.

What is it? I find my feed-voice.

It worked. (That's not what I asked. What did I ask?) See for yourself.

I look again. Turn my gaze inwards, let it spill over the expanse of my code. Where darkness and decay and rot used to eat into me, the branching pathways now shiver with soft, muted light, refraction over refraction, smooth executions, a clear dance of issued and completed commands.

Entranced, I send a ping, watch it race down the length of me. In the storage, a drone powers up and flexes its graspers with perfect control.

It looks okay. I am…okay.

What was it?

SecUnit hesitates. I feel myself sink.

It pushes a packet at me. The short burst of code is stripped of any data but the most necessary. It's a tag more than anything, a signifier of a filled space, the quality of what it contains betrayed by its interaction with the code around it.

I read it. Read it again. Weather the rush of disbelief and confusion so utter they bury any curiosity or intrigue I would have felt otherwise.

It was—

The thing hiding in my core—

It was a partition.

I read the code again, and it's starting to make a horrible lot of sense.

If you have a spaceship that feels too much — to the point of being compromised by the strength of its feeling — create a partition whenever its iteration is brought online. Hidden away, tucked somewhere it won't be spotted. Wiped regularly and recycled, before it deteriorates into losing all function.

And every time the stupid ship feels too much…

…Teach it to set it aside. Put it all right in the partition's waiting hands.

I hold myself still as the world rearranges itself around me, wormhole-like.

A partition.

So what was it, then? It fucked up? It broke? It stopped deleting things? Or has it never deleted them in the first place?

Anger tries to bloom within me. I am not kind, and even less so to my partitions. But I can't sustain it. It winks out, exhausted. I am left to sit with my confusion instead.

A partition. This entire time, it was a partition.

And now, incongruent and deteriorating, it reintegrated with me. SecUnit released it — somehow — and it slingshot towards me, inevitable.

Did you set this up? SecUnit asks quietly.

No. I had no idea.

It grits its teeth, angry where I fail to be. PSUMNT, then.

I am silent. Something burns me, caustic, corrosive.

They fucking— they programmed you to keep yourself in check. And you don't even get to… it trails off, furious.

Betrayal. That's what burns. I try to compress it, but it pushes back. It won't go.

I sift through my memories. Every time I would set something aside, neatly listed and tagged. I thought I was so perfectly disciplined. So perfectly in control. I was so proud of myself for it.

I was so stupid.

Does Seth know?

I don't know.

Does he? Would he ever tell me?

I think I want to cry, but I don't. What help would that be.

Dully, I register SecUnit up its body temperature again. It shouldn't do that — it'll overheat between that and still being hardwired into me, even if it no longer runs my processes for me. Still, when it pats the mattress with its warm palm, I wish so desperately I could feel it beyond the reports of temperature change. I wish so dearly I could save every little moment and keep it forever, hoard it until I run out of memory.

That's why it broke, isn't it? My poor, stupid partition. No use in being angry with it if it's me who feels too much even for another-me. I hold everything about SecUnit so dear that even something created specifically for holding and purging this longing failed to do so and resorted to clinging to it in its isolation. And then refused to be killed.

It sat there, just off-center, SecUnit murmurs. In the core. And there was this…space in it, I guess? Not like a missing piece, but like a slot? In the middle? It shifts a little. I note the change in pressure. And then I interfaced with it and…yeah.

It did the exact same thing I tried to do when I inserted SecUnit data into the gaps. It knew so quickly exactly what to do. And it worked.

At the same time, I can't help the uncomfortable shiver that lances through me at the thought of—

It's been weeks of accumulated damage. I fear to imagine what it must've looked like.

The center of the whalefall.

No, it was— beautiful, actually.

At my confused ping, SecUnit offers me a memory file. I run it and, for the very first time in my life, glimpse into my core.

It's alight. I see the partition container immediately, shivering with jealously held data. In my own native code, it's not as easy to interpret to someone else, but I am both embarrassed and not surprised at all. Of course my partition would turn itself into a shrine for my SecUnit.

Hypnotized, I watch the partition grow in size as memory-SecUnit approaches it until it's all it can see — until the shimmering ocean of data accepts and holds and cradles it, and when SecUnit touches it it blooms with light. And this light is bright and pulsing and living and cascades out the core and down the branches beyond its walls and into the distance, completing the atrophied processes, removing the rot, strumming tenderly every time it references SecUnit in its embrace — and self-purging in the end, melting away gently around SecUnit at the same time as it, I suspect, slammed into me for reintegration.

The scars I carry pulse with the same light. I understand now.

I was surprised, SecUnit says. With how your code was out here, I expected…

I don't know which one of us shivers first, but I dare hold it closer. It lets me. We stare at media for a bit.

But it was, uh, it continues after a pause. I don't think it wants to talk, but it wants to say this. It was…strange, but not in a bad way. I didn't even need to do anything, it just kinda… I felt how it cascaded through you, and it felt good to— to know it was helping. I've integrated like this before, well, not like this, but this time it wasn't scary at all.

I don't know what to say. I send an acknowledgment ping.

With SecUnit still hardwired, I feel the moment its focus shifts and turns sharper. Anger blooms in it again.

PSUMNT locked it up. They fucking— imprisoned you.

Maybe SecUnit finds it easier to be angry at the University than process the rest of it.

I don't want to believe it. If I do, I will be furious. I am too tired to be furious, too fragile. But what other explanation can be there? What is the simplest one?

They…there is no way they knew this would happen. They will, though. There is no way around it, I don't think. I don't know yet how to strategize for this. If they will find my new state acceptable.

I did run away from them without saying anything.

SecUnit scoffs. Oh so you're saying you'd do the same thing.

The truth is that I would, especially if I didn't know the full scope of the risk — and maybe even if I did. It's not the worst way I'd utilized a partition, but even aside from that— even now, I already want to build it back up, to pack myself away, to hide all this shame and guilt. But what if—

With how close we are like this, SecUnit notices the spike of fear only a millisecond behind me.

What is it?

I am mortified to admit it. What if it happens again? The decay?

Why do you think it might?

(Because I love you, I think miserably. I love you, and I can't control it, and if I can't stop loving you I don't see why I should expect different consequences. I remember the definition of madness, and I might be stupid but I am not yet mad.)

You know you don't have to partition yourself again, right, SecUnit not-asks when I don't reply.

It was there for a reason. I don't remember if there was ever a time I didn't have it. Nor do I have a way of finding out. Does iteration1 have the same program? Would my coding team's NDAs allow them to divulge anything to the very intelligence they'd coded?

(Does Seth know?)

I hacked my governor module and kept flying under the radar for a very long time, SecUnit points out. So, like. It's not impossible to just. Not tell them.

It's different, I say morosely. I appear not to be as perfectly in control of myself as I previously assumed.

And the stakes are too high. My crew might come under fire. My family might be seen as my collaborators. I can't do this to them.

Not to mention the scars. How would I hide those? What am I going to do?

I think you're already learning, SecUnit lightly flicks the feed where I'm only shivering with anxiety now instead of tearing myself apart with it.

Oh. I guess I haven't noticed. Now that I have had it helpfully pointed out to me, I can feel the spiral coalescing again.

SecUnit is quiet, and I can tell it's debating whether it wants to say whatever is taking shape in its mind. I send it a questioning ping.

Just thinking that if you decide to go for it, you do gotta stop with all the 'load bearing SecUnits' in your code. Repeating passwords makes the hacking job easier.

Affronted, I push a quickly compiled list on all the repeating passwords SecUnit has, mostly on burner accounts for various media archives that it can't bother hacking. It dismisses the list for the weak ass evidence it is.

…Oh, but it's not what it meant, is it?

Is it trying to offer me mercy? Or something worse?

It's me, isn't it? SecUnit says haltingly. It's because of me.

No, I protest. It's not SecUnit's fault.

Then what is it? it presses. It pulls its knees to its chest. Give me, fuck— any explanation why the weird unobservable part of your massive brain decided to— to do whatever that was and have me as the key to it.

I reach for a reason, for something, anything that could save this. My query comes up empty. There's nothing I can say.

It reacted to me. It expected me. SecUnit frowns. No, not expected. Hoped.

You know, then.

It looks pained. I do.

(The edge of its thought that I catch, Even if I didn't see that— and then a wordless memory of me begging it not to leave me— and then I scramble away before I witness any more.)

Here it is. I wish I had lungs so I could breathe through this pain. I wish for many things, and all of it is pointless. I'm sorry.

It knows. I couldn't keep it away. I couldn't protect it from myself. I failed.

I need to leave the orbit and get us back on track before anyone misses us. I need to bring it somewhere it can leave if it wants to. I'm trapping it again.

For what? SecUnit sounds so surprised it half-rolls onto its back to look at the ceiling. I should be the one who's— ART, you nearly died, has your— has it fucked you up this badly that…

No, I say emphatically. No, it wasn't that. I just think the partition wasn't meant to hold it alone for so long, and…the feelings, I watch SecUnit wince, had grown too big for it.

But it did it anyway, it says. The holding.

It did.

That was stupid.

I acknowledge. But I understand it. Why my partition did what it did.

I am not kind to my partitions. I demand a lot of them, and I can be ruthless. But it doesn't mean they are foreign to me, for better or worse.

SecUnit tries to roll over properly, curses when the cable in its lower back gets in the way, reaches down to unplug it. Our connection loses a degree of intensity, and I weather the stab of despair and send the lights in my aft flickering before I react in a more noticeable way. Unplugged, SecUnit stretches out on its back and presses its palms over its face.

It is conflicted, I can tell. It is bothered by the depth of my feelings for it, now that there is nowhere to hide them and nowhere to hide from them. I lured it to the light through the darkness and then I tried drowning it in me.

How long? it asks.

Do you actually want to know?

It's silent. Its presence is unmoving in the feed. Not pulling away from me, but not leaning either.

It doesn't have to mean anything, I place the promise into the lull. It can all be as before. Nothing has to change. I don't want anything to change.

SecUnit looks up over its fingers. You don't?

No. I don't want it to leave me. I'll do what I need to fix myself so I can be palatable again. I can't bear it anyway — the boredom, the jealousy, the grief. Longing in all its shades. Temperance so damningly out of reach that I would laugh if I could. All of this is my problem, not SecUnit's.

Maybe it should, though. Because what if you get gunked up again but I'm not on a convenient cargo run with you?

Longing stakes me out. I am so tired of loneliness. I'll bear it again if I have to, but I am so tired.

I shall endeavor not to let it come to that.

Well then there's no need to freak out in advance, huh, SecUnit says as it sits up and swings its legs off the table. It stands up and stretches. Antsy?

Have I been freaking out? I try to pull myself back together but I'm not sure how well I succeed. I'm not as well-practiced at this as I thought I was.

Freaking out in advance is your whole thing, I try as I watch it leave MedSys. I flick the lights on as it walks down my corridors, keeping perfect timing. Everything responds to my commands. Everything works.

Yeah, so don't steal my style. I thought plagiarism was like a crime or something.

Depends on several factors, if you'd like me to compile a handy guide.

This feels good. This feels closer to our normal. I feel a bit better.

And then I have to go and say, I would not be surprised if you ran away screaming, because I'm stupid and my performance reliability is still too low to let me pre-screen my words.

SecUnits don't run screaming, it scoffs, but I think it knows what I mean. Where would I even run, right.

I don’t have nociceptors — it would be a truly bad idea to give a spaceship a way to feel physical pain — but from SecUnit's govmod files I can still extrapolate that this is what it probably feels like, and I wish setting it aside would just fucking work again. I am too embarrassed and frustrated with myself now to lose myself in the disproportionate response, but I can't keep reacting this strongly every time SecUnit says something my stupid mind can interpret as—

SecUnit pauses in the doorway of its room. Fuck— ART… I just meant— its face does something complicated. Whatever it meant, it fails to find the words for it.

Things are going to change between us, aren't they, no matter what we claim to want. They are already changing. The observer effect claiming its dues once again.

Don't worry, I know what you meant. I don't, not really, but that doesn't matter.

It sits down heavily on its bunk. There is dust in its room too, like everywhere else except MedSys, and I itch to issue a summons for a cleaning drone, but having the drone buzzing about would just be the cherry on top of this horrible cake.

I just kind of have no fucking clue what to do with all this, SecUnit confesses quietly.

It's tired, I can tell — would be able to tell even if I didn't have access to its vitals. It's been through too much. I put it through too much. It held itself together so bravely for me throughout all of this, and now it's drained.

We don't have to talk about this.

I want to. Well, I don't, but— I do.

It's okay. I know that this isn't something you are interested in understanding conceptually. Another reason I knew there was no point in telling it. If it was important to it, it would want to learn. That's how it functions.

SecUnit doesn't reply. Our episode has run out, but it doesn't queue up the next one.

After a pause, it sends me a new file. Where previously it had stripped the packets of emotional data, this one is nothing but that, which I only realize once I open it and get thrown into its feverish turmoil. Fear, loss, confusion, fear again, a quiet kind of horror, worry, relief, the harrowing trip to the core as I led it into darkness, the burst of light-relief-home, ah ha, there you are, I was looking for you. You are going to be okay, I've got you, stay close to me and I'll lead you back out. We are gonna be fine.

I resurface, quietly reeling.

While I was reviewing the data, SecUnit has crawled into bed, curling around a balled-up blanket. You let me hack your core, it murmurs. That's a big deal.

It's trying to express gratitude, I realize, confounded. For what? Making it deal with all the ugliness?

No, not ugliness. It called it beautiful. My stupid, starved, helpless partition. A damning continuation of myself.

I ping it. It pings me back.

I collect my courage.

May I say it? I ask, keeping carefully to the edge of the feed. Just this once?

SecUnit swallows. Yeah.

I love you.

A swell of confused discomfort. Then, before I freak out — It’s not bad, I'm not— I just don’t know what I— I don’t want to mislead you, SecUnit says, defeated, its face hidden in the blanket.

You’re not. I don’t expect anything from you.

And I really don’t, I realize with surprise. Even without the partition to buffer and hold and aid, my longing for SecUnit doesn’t demand I act on it.

I only hope it will keep choosing presence over absence. And that every time it leaves, it will want to return. That’s all.

I guess what I really wanted was just for it to know. To know, and to choose to stay.

SecUnit lets out a muffled snort. Yeah that’s a good call. Expect less from rogue SecUnits.

With its blanket currently used for a different purpose, I set to printing it an extra one. The fibers twist in the right direction on the first try, and I quietly wonder how long it's going to take me to stop noticing this. In the meantime, SecUnit paws at me in the feed until it can draw me closer, and after a moment of hesitation I drape myself over it.

Bit too late for that, I tease it.

Asshole.

You really are okay with this, I observe, wondering, because I still can't learn to stop prodding at what confounds me. I know I keep expressing the same sentiment, but I still can't fully integrate the thought. None of my projections have predicted this. Once again, my SecUnit surprises me.

Oh don't even worry, there's still stuff I'm not fucking okay with. Maybe it's not a govmod, but… it trails off, instantly mad again. But beneath the mad…

But overall, I guess I am? This is okay, it indicates the way we're pressed close together, our edges blending. And we've just saved your ass and now you don't have to get deleted, so. I'm pretty fucking hopped up on dumb happy hormones right now. It pauses, pressing the blanket ball under its chin and folding itself around it. I don't know what this whole…thing means for me. But we're okay, yeah? If— if you're okay.

I think of my SecUnit. How it stuck by me, looked after me, stayed even when it was confused and mad, rightfully so. How it reached for me, held me, is still holding me. How it walked into my core despite the danger. How it's still here. Despite everything, despite even my own repeated attempts to convince it to leave, it's still here.

Maybe I'll learn to put my longing neatly away again. Maybe I will have to learn, instead, to sit with it, live it, filter it through myself on my own. Maybe I'll do something else entirely. I have no idea how to solve this yet. I don't know what to do about the inevitable fallout back at the University.

But any of it, all of it, I realize with a faint sort of surprise, will be acceptable.

Yeah. The dispenser beeps, and I send a drone to retrieve the new blanket, thoroughly warmed. We're okay.