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Since I’d returned to Preservation, I’d had plenty of opportunity to observe my human clients under normal, not-in-mortal-peril circumstances. Newsflash: they’re still all hot messes, but some of them are actual walking disasters, by which I mean Gurathin. Well, he was at the moment. Ratthi had pulled me to one side (cornered me) and said he was ‘having a bit of a rough time since coming back.’ He’d then launched into a long, wandering explanation about cumulative trauma from living in the Corporation Rim getting re-awakened by being back there (which I deleted because I know all about that shit), and dealing with his squishy human feelings for Mensah, which I also deleted because it was gross.
But it was true that Gurathin was not looking great, and not looking after himself very well, so everybody was being extra nice to him and trying to do stuff for him (or to him, it sometimes seemed like). I had a drone watching him, and had got it in his face a few times when he kept forgetting to eat meals, but I was getting this annoying feeling that I should maybe do something more. It was my job to protect my clients and my client’s condition was…sub-optimal. Unfortunately, protecting clients from their own messy human emotions is a lot more difficult than protecting them from hostile fauna.
Recently, the team had all made him a large handmade card, on which Arada had painted a nice picture of some planet landscape, and they had filled it with messages like, ‘You deserve happiness,’ ‘We love you Gugu,’ and, inevitably, ‘We can talk about this.’ Just reading it made my performance reliability drop 6 percentage points.
“You can write something too if you want SecUnit!” Arada had said, hopefully. Even the thought made my performance reliability drop another 8 points and quickly exited to check the perimeter. They had given Gurathin the card, along with some baked goods Bharadwaj had made, and a knitted blanket just last night. He read it looking like he would have preferred an acid bath, but also then his eyes watered and he mumbled some thanks and there was lots of hugging and human emotions and I cut the drone feed.
But I still had this super annoying feeling that I should sort of do something too. Or say something. After some consideration, I decided that I would like to say something to him, but also not talk to him at all. Maybe I could also send a card? That had words on I didn’t have to speak? Ugh. No. (What was I thinking?) After some serious searching for appropriately affirmative phrases and nice pictures, I accidentally discovered a ‘demotivational’ site that appeared to be humorous, but had exactly what I needed.
I sent the image to him the next morning, when he was moping on the sofa and failing to perform necessary hygiene or nutritional activities.
Against a nice background of a stream running through a forest, the words said: ‘Remember to practice self-care. Because you are a fucking mess.’ He looked startled that I’d messaged him, then he read it, and then he – laughed. And picked up one of Bharadwaj's cakes. A quick check of my logs revealed this was the first time he’d laughed in six cycles. Then he looked directly at my hovering drone, deliberately taking a huge bite which was – ugh, eating plus indirect eye contact. Asshole. He had a kind of strange smile on his face. Well, he always was a weirdo.
“Pretty rich from a construct who thinks repeat watching the same episodes of that shitty serial counts as self-care,” he said to the drone. Well, I couldn’t let that pass, could I?
If you watched premium quality entertainment I guarantee you wouldn’t be miserable all the time, asshole, I sent over the feed. Immediately as I said it, I realised that this was the genius solution to Gurathin’s problem. Of course he would feel better if he watched Sanctuary Moon. Who wouldn’t? I almost wished I hadn’t sent the affirmation now. I should have just marched on over and forced him to watch media. In fact, I was going to do just that.
Pretty sure that crap would make me immeasurably more miserable, Gurathin was grumbling. I mean, come on, are you seriously trying to tell me you think that the relationship arc between NavBot and Captain Hossein is remotely believable? And not completely cringeworthy at that? I left my station apartment and began to trek over to him.
Are you trying to tell me constructs cannot love? I retorted, feeling oddly hurt.
No that’s not what I – Then I stopped in my tracks.
Hang on a minute, you have been watching the show! I interrupted. Ha! I had him now. Gurathin ignored that, he was still busy with his completely invalid criticism.
And then NavBot killing Lieutenant Kogi to save Flight Officer Hordoop-Sklanch, make that make sense. Huh?
What? That never happened. Have you been watching the episodes out of order or something?
No, I have stupid incomplete fragments of episodes 420 to 568 scrambled up in my memories and my augments have no idea how to logically file all this crap. Every time one pops up I have to delete it. Of course I haven’t been watching it. I had started walking again and now had to stop again and face the wall a minute.
So that’s where my missing episodes went.
Bits of them, came the dry reply. I focused replaying the last few moments of my drone footage of him, which I’d been ignoring because he’d been eating. Arguing with me over the feed about Sanctuary Moon was the most animated his face had looked in days. Right. I was taking care of this augmented human right now in one of the only two ways I knew how: through premium quality entertainment (the other way involving being a killing machine, which had its moments, but was less fun and more stressful, all told).
I had reached his apartment at this point, walked straight in, ignored his protests, picked him up by the scruff of his hoodie and dumped him on the sofa (ignoring more protests), and brought up episode 1 season 1 of Sanctuary Moon on the display screen.
“We are correcting your misconceptions and emotional dysregulation,” I told him. He opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and closed it again. This happened a couple more times through the titles.
“There’s so many episodes of this I’ll literally die of old age before it finishes,” he muttered, eventually, but he carried on watching. Eventually, he relaxed.