Chapter Text
Chapter One
I have a total of forty-two drones aboard ART. (Okay, the Asshole Research Transport that I’m on is actually called Perihelion, but seeing as it threatened to melt my neural tissue when we first met and later kidnapped me, I’d say it’s more than earned the nickname.) Thirty one of them are small intel drones no more than a centimeter across, ten are bigger, standard-sized scout drones, and one is a large, newly-constructed ops drone, with extendable arms used for manipulating the environment that unfold out from its central, oval-shaped body. It’s a lot like the drone that ART piloted on that stupid fucking alien-remnant-contaminated planet, although it probably won’t be as much of a sarcastic asshole.
Kidding. I’ll still be the one operating it.
I’m supposed to be writing a program with ART so I can download an partial iteration of myself into the ops drone’s feed and pilot it into dangerous places, but seeing as I’m a SecUnit and it’s literally my job to go into dangerous places, doing that all seems a bit redundant, and I’ve been avoiding it.
Whatever. The point is, I have all of these drones, plus access to ART’s public area camera feeds, and I still didn’t see her coming.
“Excuse me. Can I draw you, please?”
My threat assessment module momentarily spiked as I spun around in the hallway and used the (apparently pointless) scout drones buzzing around my head in a recon formation to look at whoever had just tugged on the back of my jacket.
It was a female human child. I think. I mean, obviously I knew it was a human, but I have a hard enough time telling the age and gender of adult humans and augmented humans, mostly because I don’t actually care. I was 64% sure that this one was considered female, and 88% sure she wasn’t anywhere close to being fully grown. Old enough to not be monitored by a parental unit at all times, maybe, but definitely too young to be sneaking up on anxious human/bot constructs that call themselves Murderbot in the hallway. (Although honestly, that’s not a good idea for anybody.)
This small human had light tan skin, long, dark hair that hung loosely down her back, and large, dark eyes that were fixed on my left shoulder. I checked myself on a security camera behind her to see if I had something weird stuck to my clothing, but no. She was just… staring at it.
She repeated the question. ”Can I draw you, please?”
“What? No!” I finally said. “Why do you want to draw me? And what are you looking at?”
She blinked rapidly for 1.4 seconds, then slowly dragged her eyes towards my face.
“Sorry,” she said stiffly, as I looked at her through my drones. “I want to draw you because you’re good at holding still. Most people move around too much and that makes it hard to get things right.”
You know when a haulerbot isn’t aligned properly, and it keeps drifting off to one side as it moves, so it has to jerk itself back over once in a while to stay on its intended path? Yeah, that’s how she looked at me. Her face seemed kind of frozen in a neutral expression, but as she spoke her gaze kept sliding towards my shoulder again, or the ceiling, or the hallway behind me until she quickly self-corrected, as if it was difficult for her to make and maintain–
My organic parts did a weird little lurch as I recognized what was happening, and I turned my head slightly towards the wall, instead of facing her. The small human seemed to relax a little as she focused her eyes back onto my shoulder.
“You should ask someone else,” I said, as I turned to walk away. “I’m on my way to a meeting right now and I don’t have time.”
Technically, it wasn’t a lie. I had told ART that I was heading back to my cabin to watch media after our actual meeting with Seth, its captain (as much as anyone could be), about the new drone project, and it had sent a request to begin watching one of the old files we had gotten from the planetary colonists together. It was a musical historical drama, and a huge surprise hit with ART’s crew. People were singing snippets of it to each other everywhere, and it was becoming too annoying to ignore.
“Oh, it doesn’t have to be right now,” the small human said, as she deliberately stepped back into my path. “I’m very, very busy right now, too. But we can do it later, so– HI IRIS!! IRIS!! HII!!”
She began frantically waving down the hall behind me, smiling and shouting so incredibly loudly that I had to turn my hearing down 18 percent.
“Hey there, Eden!” said a voice behind me. It was (big surprise) Iris, one of ART’s augmented human crew members and, believe it or not, its sibling. She’s also Seth’s daughter, in case things weren’t complicated enough for you. (They really should be – not even Timestream Defenders Orion would attempt a familial unit this ridiculous.)
“Is this person bothering you?” Iris winked at me as she spoke, which I knew indicated a joke of some kind, but I was too busy trying to keep my face from doing… whatever it was that it was definitely doing to try and figure it out. It felt weird enough hearing myself being called a person (I know, I should be used to that by now, but when you spend most of your existence classified as disposable equipment, it’s hard to shake), but hearing the name ‘Eden,’ a name that I had used as an alias when I was pretending to be an augmented human security consultant back in RaviHyral, was so unexpected that my performance reliability dropped 3.6%.
“No, I’m fine,” the small human said. “Do you want to see some of my art?”
“Well, sure…” began Iris. She had bent down with her arms slightly outstretched, indicating the offer of an embrace, but the small human ignored her and was rummaging around in a sparkly bag slung over her shoulder instead. Without waiting for an answer, she pulled out a small personal display surface and shoved it into my hand.
“I put all of my heart and soul into it,” she said, “so it’s very good.”
Iris’s mouth did a funny smile/frown thing as she looked at Eden, then up at me. “I can take that for you,” she said, straightening up and reaching for the display that I was holding like an incendiary device primed to explode at any moment.
“No! I want for it to look first,” Eden said forcefully. Her small brows were furrowed and she was pointing and glaring at me. Well, near me, at least.
I was so taken aback by her response that I automatically turned and looked down at it with my actual eyes, compelled to follow her order as if I still had a functioning governor module, instead of the hacked system now rattling uselessly around in my neural tissue. Oh, I really didn’t like that.
On the display’s surface was a drawing of… a person? It was terrible. The line work was uneven, the proportions were all off, I didn’t even know what was happening with the hands, and–
Holy shit.
It was Three. It was somehow both a terrible drawing, and an incredibly accurate portrait of Three, the other SecUnit aboard. Its expression was one of suppressed eager anticipation and mild general confusion, mixed with an overall sense of… wholesome anxiety? (Is that even a thing?) It was all there, in the angle of the lines that made up its eyebrows and its small, pinched smile, in the way it was awkwardly positioning itself in the chair with its center of gravity all wrong. Everything about it was exactly Three. At the bottom of the drawing was a curly letter E, surrounded by pink hearts and small loopy flowers.
I looked down at the small human - Eden - and asked “Is this Three? Why did you draw Three?”
“Yes! And I told you already! Because you two don’t move around all the time, but Perihelion said I had to ask first!”
“Of course Peri has something to do with this,” Iris muttered, and because ART is everywhere all the time, and has no sense of fucking privacy, I could feel it stretching lazily in the feed at the mention of its name. She finally took the display surface from me and looked at it. “Huh. Wow, that really does look like Three. Good job!”
“Thank you,” Eden said. Then she took a deep, slow breath, looked up into my eyes and said, “Can you compliment me, too, please? I worked very hard on that.”
I immediately turned and faced the wall, my drones orbiting my head in a tight, agitated formation. I don’t know, all of this was getting to be too much, and I didn’t know you could just ask for a compliment like that.
“Can she do that?” I asked Iris, because that was the only thing I could think about right now. “Just, ask for a compliment like that?”
“Well, she sure did!” Iris said, laughing a little. She bent back down, not demanding Eden’s focus, but offering up hers instead. “I think our friend needs a few minutes right now. Do you want to come with me down to the galley? I heard Barrett made cookies. What do you say?”
“Okay, yeah! Is it busy in there?” Her hand went to one ear, absentmindedly touching her bright purple feed interface.
“Mmm, I don’t think so,” Iris said. “But if you want, you can wait outside and I can go in and get one for you. Does that sound better?”
“Yeah, okay. Okay, goodbye SecUnit! I’ll come find you later!”
Iris gave me a quick wave goodbye and the pair walked off towards the galley, while Eden listed in descending preferred order the types of cookies she hoped would be there.
I continued standing in the hallway facing the wall for another 13 minutes and 24 seconds. Two other crew members I didn’t know walked by, and from the atmospheric buzz I could tell that they both started hurriedly communicating in their feeds as soon they saw me, while I just stood there like an idiot trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened.