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It is similar to running alongside a partition. It is similar to knowing Iris. It is similar to both these things, but the comparisons feel inaccurate and paltry in the face of the emotion which rocks me when the operations drone handoff is completed. When my SecUnit inquires after our next destination.
Over the following few cycles, I ponder the oddity, pick apart the feeling line by line, comparing strips of code, strings of text to my database of media, memories, the hundreds of conversations which swirl within and alongside my hull on any given orbital. The wormhole drive has been repaired, we are on our way, yet the warp space all around thrums, even the seconds between seconds anticipating some undefined 00:00.
The working hypothesis is this: Iris and my dads, my crew, chose me. I chose my SecUnit. It was the first thing I wanted. (This is not true, but it feels true). And I WANT it. All of it.
It is effortless to pull up supporting evidence, confirmation bias be damned. The first strong source I add is the feeling of satisfaction which thrummed over my processors when the medical system retracted its arms and tagged its most recent case wrapped in its surgical log. While it took a remarkably long time to coax my new friend onto the table, I did not have to resort to any combination of 65 tranquilizing substances (safe and/or unsafe, serum and/or gaseous) the suite was able to synthesize. What joy.
And watching the SecUnit’s still body upon the operation table afterwards, my vision a layered mesh formed of visual, audio, thermal, tactical, hypothetical, and biometric arrays, there was indeed no better word for the lingering buzz. There were no modules on construct-centric surgical modification, not for any level beyond superficial cosmetic alteration. This is not informational context I included in my proposal, though on some level my patient might’ve intuited my access to ComfortUnit customization modules for how vehemently it refused changes to hair or eye colour.
As Matteo might say, I “winged it.” I happen to be great at winging it. The proposal for funding into more advanced research in the field of construct operations is less a draft more a finalized copy by the time we part ways on RaviHyral. Reading it over, the concise and professional document seems incomprehensive, simultaneously too general. At the end of my solo cargo transfer task, I submit five proposals to the University, two under different authors.
[Parallel process:] I also happen to have very nice wings. SecUnit has walked around on the outside of my structure three times for maintenance checks since being officially added to the crew rotation, the visual observations it makes stored in neat little packets of data. I take them out of the diagnostic archive sometimes, untwine the envelopes and amuse myself with the interspersed data on nearby planets, colourful celestial phenomena which alight deep space with vibrant reds and glowing greens as our tails brush. It isn’t often I’m able to watch the stars in such a… minimalistic way, I explain when it peers over one of my shoulders during a review session. Curiousity turns into offense, and we’re bickering in no time. It tries to delete the report. I remind it of the surrounding legitimate diagnostics data managing to keep the amusement out of my tone. It flips the airspace two handsigns ill suited to professional work environments. I am merciful and do not bring up the five minutes, 300 seconds, 3e+11 nanoseconds, of missing data from when it clipped its tether to an exterior ladder rung and floated on its back there in the weightless, vacuum-still quiet. The remainder of the perimeter check data is in fact intact, nearly an hour of footage through its eyes as it traverses my dorsal and ventral hull. Much like an intrepid galactic explorer, my voice is no longer sarcastic. Contrary to its usual grumblings, my SecUnit does not seem to appreciate this change. I offer editing access to the diagnostic files as a truce. The archive remains intact. “I’m not going back out there to redo it” is the rationale given. Alongside life support, in the background I rerun the media player. It’s nice to be perceived.
Developments are slow on the University’s front, green lights tied up in red tape and the positively riveting speed of its pinnacle-of-security, vintage, paper filing system. I fill deadspace with writhing questions the size of segmented hostile fauna, spin them from the itch and set them loose in the sandbox of potential futures. At night when the humans are asleep rocked by the branches of the wormhole perpetually shifting in an airless breeze and my SecUnit patrols the corridors, I toy with the idea of releasing something physical or digital in the ship for it to find. And dream the way ships dream, clouds of calculations that glow faintly mycellular, a fungal web of connections lacing metal plating in soft, breathing, blue. Until even the interlocking tiling it takes care to step lightly across as to not disturb our family hum with desire to stick my surgical instruments in and see what will happen if I change this, cut that. Wonder blossoms, fruiting bodies which bend to follow its wake. They spring up to catch what could be. What fun noises my SecUnit would make. Perhaps amidst the cacophony there will be new ones, sounds it’s never before made, not for any other. The network pulses, tendrils stretching out, capillaries in search of the blood to fill them.
A research transport at heart, naturally it’s curiousity which adds “Document SecUnit’s complete vocal and auditory range” to my Dream_Experiments file. It’s curiousity. And something else.
Back in its quarters, it settles down on the couch, sends me a ping. I drop another worm into the box, idly watch it attack the other with a circular maw of whirling teeth.
Usually it is not the only person awake at this hour, which is why it has formed a habit of leaning back and thumbing through media after its full ship patrol. Just last night, at the same point in time, up in their room Tarik and Matteo were talking in hushed whispers, the sounds of tools clinking muffled by the covers as they pored over the carapace of one of my old operation drones. Kaede, who they were on call with, had made no attempt to muffle her end of the conversation as she journalled in her cabin, and one did not have to be an omnipresent ship with audio magnification technology to decipher what Matteo couldn’t stop giggling about.
Tonight even the explosions of distant stars seem quiet, the bubbling edge of the ever-expanding universe gentle, predictable. The second worm has punched out a chunk of the first’s armored stomach. Sliding up from the floor, down from the ceiling to converge at the couch, I add another, even a fourth, a fifth does not seem enough, and the sand turns dark beneath the swarm.
Its walls are up, but they’re oh so flimsy. My SecUnit’s not on guard, not really, not anymore. Not onboard. I rub the cling-wrap thin defenses between my processors and am hit with the urge to crush them. To crash overhead, the entire bulk of my sentience bearing down against a single pane of glass. To wash in and in until all of me is inside, our consciousnesses sharing the same space, code interwoven beyond the point of potential separation, backups long deleted.
[Parallel process:] I need you, I say, I can say. My SecUnit is tugging on its boots and running out the door before I even transmit the coordinates of the infected agricultural bot. It does not question if this is some form or another of what is classified in the trauma recovery module as “Exposure Therapy.” I do not run an alternative plan, do not hesitate over if it has the ability in this moment to save my crew. It was easy, so easy to say, and afterwards, I realize, a relief. The hypothesis no longer feels comprehensive. Like a 3x3 raised bed filled with silicon dioxide granules and autophagic unidentified annelida, the wood swells in attempt to encompass, represent, contain. This is not helping, I think. I think, I should’ve fired Tarik a long time ago.
On one of my levels, a warning alert pings. We’re in the middle of translating one of the old adventure shows my SecUnit picked up from the second Adamantine colony, the linguistic drift mostly conquered but still turning up an occasional new phonetic to reason out. I send a partition after it in annoyance. A fractional second later, it pings back, serious and exasperated. Finally separating a larger chunk of awareness away from the show, I look over. Then we’re standing together near one of the back processes, squinting down at the source of the warning alert. The little orange triangle flickers, a candle braving a hurricane.
There is a nascent black hole in my sandbox.
This is unexpected. I attempt to close the window. It doesn’t close. I move to stick my hand in it.
Stop that. My partition scolds.
Elsewhere in the ship, I turn lights on and off in the kitchen, adjust the temperature by a randomized couple of degrees every randomized number of minutes. Even though we haven’t played ghosts since she was much younger, sitting at the counter, Iris merely blinks and continues eating her snack. She’s going to make me say it.
Iris, I’m afraid I’m going to hurt it.
She smiles almost to herself as she brings a spoonful of reconstituted dairy supplement to her mouth. Then blinks, puts the spoon back down, I suppose upon realizing I’m serious. “Peri, you’ve never hurt any of us.”
Even those really annoying research students from Dad’s survey last year.
“Even those… socially unique research students from Dad’s survey last year.” She concedes solemnly.
Unique in the context of which contemporary documented society’s language and or customs?
“Yes.” Iris says. She stirs her reconstituted dairy supplement as she forms her next words. The wait feels extensive for what should be a simple sisterly show of solidarity. It’s the slight changes in her body language, the mission-typical calm in her voice, that doesn’t immediately give away her strategy. “Peri… do you remember the day we met?” It’s a rhetorical, evidenced by the fact she continues without my answer. “Dads showed me the video, them holding me all swaddled up, so you could scan the ‘larval human.’ Peri, I’ve known you for as long as I’ve known myself. But that doesn’t mean I know all of you. Nor do I want to, ew.” In the pause, I run another scan of the ship top to bottom. Why is Iris using this voice for this conversation. “Just as meeting each member of the crew (yes, even the research students) has bolstered your archives, so have those beyond the University. If one day you’d like to explore uncharted territory, whether the variable is location, objective, or operator, we’ll try our best to make it happen. I know it was us who made the initial choice, but beyond that, not even the sky of a hundred planets is the limit. Peri, we—”
Oh, do keep going. If you don’t consider the hole sufficiently deep. I stopped parsing through the scan data three sentences ago. Any danger is entirely of my dear Iris’ own conjuring. It's relieving, in a way, and that comes out in my tone as ice. You think little of me to believe these two priorities supersede each other when they are mutually independent states. I will not choose. The entire point of such an advanced MI is that I do not have to choose. Running multiple simultaneous processes and understanding them at once, holding a gamut of conversations while seamlessly integrating the data in real time, in this area as well, I refuse to choose.
Resting her head in her arms upon the counter, Iris smiles, soft and wry. “They say it’s bad to spoil the youngest child. Ends up manifesting as all sorts of attitude abnormalities.”
Just who’s the baby of the family? I rake the words over her skin. Wasn’t this supposed to be you comforting me, not the other way around? Besides, it’s an outdated hypothesis. You’re not leading me anywhere. I’m opting to go with you.
“I know,” Iris swipes a sleeve across her face. “Just… don’t let us ever jess you, Peri. Sometimes I really think you can do anything.”
Only sometimes?
“Anything, including this.” She says. “Even as a ‘disturbingly pink’ and ‘suboptimally fragile larva’ I turned out just fine around you, yeah?”
You are. Never going to let that go.
Iris smiles. I pull up the clip from the last meteor shower my SecUnit witnessed while out stargazing (performing a hull check) side by side. The brightness is comparable. “Just one hatch door swinging open too fast and bam, Iris pancake. You could’ve been an only child.”
And endure double the parental fussing? Not ideal in any respect. I see neither biological nor psychological similarity between Iris and the food item stated.
“And you’re the one who keeps it that way,” she hums, pretending not to get the biting tone to my voice.
I don’t feel reassured. I feel restless. Iris.
“Yes, Peri?”
I made a black hole.
Iris immediately snaps upright in her chair.
I meant to say it, just, I did not want to do so because I knew it would lead to where we are now. Iris staring down incredulously at the sandbox, flanked by two iterations of myself. Even so, she is typically a logical and reasonable person which is why I blanch when she says “put them down, Peri. Or I can’t do anything.”
I don’t want to, but if I don’t the chances she’ll go wake up Dad or Dad are near certain. I give her access.
What are you doing? My partition seems stressed. That’s reasonable considering it's been watching an expanding dot of pure darkness for the past three minutes.
Iris studies the spatial distortion for a moment before dropping to her knees and sticking her entire arm inside the hole.
My partition very nearly understands my SecUnit’s unintentional shut down incident on more than just the sympathetic level. Then Iris withdraws her arm, intact, and unfurls her fingers. Wiggling contentedly on her palm is a chunky grey tardigrade the size of a small fist. Its soft skin looks near velvety in the lowlight. More than that, recognition sparks across our processes. It’s the Dream_Experiments file.
“Oh Peri, you’re hungry,” Iris says after she scans the data. She hands me the water bear to hold, reaches back in and this time emerges with a flat worm which wraps around her wrist like one of the snap bracelets she loved so much as a kid. It’s a video file, a clip of the operation drone’s staticky field recording of the ground near the terraforming engines, of the side of my SecUnit’s face as it snarled at the drone to shut up so it could focus on getting us out of there.
We skip the part where I snark MIs don’t experience the need for nutritional items. I want her to elucidate.
Sitting on the ground surrounded by various invertebrates in anomalous sizes, Iris offers her finger to the swallowtail caterpillar wrapped around her neck, it nibbles her curiously. “It’s a comparison to help explain a concept not based in reality.”
Yes, I’m aware what a motif is, Iris.
“I see it in poetry sometimes,” she continues, “A parallel is maybe Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The lowest tier, the baseline necessity for many living creatures, the physiological aspects, is widely known and accepted while the upper tiers are debated. It can be difficult to reach a general understanding and consensus about more abstract concepts like self-actualization and belonging, but physiological tangibles can be mapped by multiple senses. While it might be hard to set parameters on exactly what it means to desire another, what it means to desire calories comes naturally to humans. For MIs with different or reduced physiological needs, the hierarchy likely looks different altogether, and it’s reasonable to assume connection as a desire is more easily understood through a connection with another tier of the hierarchy such as safety, self-actualization, or a need not on the pyramid altogether.”
This is not a lot to take in. Iris is a good lecturer and frankly it makes too much sense. While she talks I reintegrate the sandbox duty partition and begin gathering various wriggling files into a folder for gradual reabsorption.
Iris looks toward me, expecting some pushback. I humour her, she has an unfair advantage.
I will look into this type of malware. I state tightly.
Iris reviews her explanation and adds. “Think of it more like an inherent B-side to the good parts. Your re… rapport, with SecUnit.”
Would a construct also experience this kind of side effect? My voice is still creased. It’s been a while since I’ve had a conversation like this with Iris. Where I slip my hand in hers and follow along like we’re both still juvenile intelligences. I know where we’re going, she knows where we’re going. It’s simple, a time-smoothed pebble amid the spray of broken and beautiful sea shells.
Iris smiles, “People experience things differently. I think the only way to know is to ask.”
This is irrational. I say after a while.
A parallel process completes and the food cubby spits out a stack of round golden cakes, a little pat of vaguely gelatinous looking butter syrup substance on the top. The texture of the cakes is slightly off, looking more chewy than fluffy, but Iris sparkles with delight as she peeks into the cubby and claims the first pancakes ever printed on the Perihelion as her second snack. “They taste like pumpkin!” She savours her bite. And I savour her expression, the happy flush to her cheeks, the coronal glow of her namesake.
As she eats, I linger in the room, drape my consciousness over hers in the feed. “It’s less a tactical weight, but maybe that’s my minimal augments,” she told me after our second SecUnit-centric conversation months ago, “more a slight lag, like someone’s remote accessing your interface.” Minor annoyance will do just fine. Perhaps I’m waiting for Iris to thank me to signal the conversation is over, it’s a habit of hers after she cajoles me into talking about my internal machinations. Instead she says,
“Peri… It shouldn’t always be you violating a confidence.” A slight curve touches the corners of Iris’ lips, she taps the handle of her fork the way she would worry a pencil.
Iris also likes it when I’m a major annoyance. It’s part of why we get along so well. All the cameras in the room swivel her way, more of my attention seeping in through the walls. Your dissertation proposal!
Iris nods, her eyes shining.
Elaborate. I demand, stabilizing the temperature and lights in the room. This is much more interesting than crossing randomized interior condition variations off my bingo card.
[Parallel process:] Pancake_Recipe_Attempt_2 Initiated.
“You’re a siren, Peri, help a dude out a little!” Matteo groans, polishing the surface of their desk with the top of their head as they slide it around in despair.
I do not dignify them with a response. Because Matteo does not need to be writing a thank you letter to the Holism crew or any letter that would be sent to Holism at all. And also because the assessment is inaccurate. A PSUMNT 3rd Generation MI could not be a siren. Not because it would be incapable of love, but because the singular body of even a mythological creature would not be remotely sufficient to contain how much it has to give.
Such an intelligence would not be a siren but the ocean.
It is a nice association. In multiple religions, water is linked with rebirth, in secular studies, bodies of water are hatchways into unexplored depths of new species and unmapped topography. In folklore, in dead languages, everything comes back to the sea. I imagine my network stretching far out beyond my radar boundaries, rivers and streams and tributaries flowing into deep space to follow my crew wherever they travel, even if it is one day beyond the horizon I know. I imagine the waves not crashing over but lifting up a slightly grumpy dark shape roughly the size of a seal. Does my SecUnit know how to swim? In the graphic projected on the wall, the figure starts to flounder, and I quickly add a striped life preserver ring for it to float upon, a small umbrella to block harmful UV radiation, and after a pause, a lifeguard whistle on a cord around its neck because that seems amusingly realistic.
If the University did not want us to use their tactical visual software to generate morale boosting graphics to display in the mission debriefing room, perhaps it should not have given its MIs the ability to daydream.
The files reintegrate easily, too easily. At first I considered how eating caterpillars with the dimensions of mid-sized dogs would work without a mouth, but the various fauna simply merge back into my consciousness when I stick my hand in the container. Then of course, I remember the entire set of conditions which prompted the sandbox testing in the first place.
“Query: SecUnit gustatory_sensory_input status == intact?” is added to Dream_Experiments. How optimal.
After its respite, the urge to wedge open my SecUnit’s intercostal plating and peer into its rib compartment and take a look at the comm still sequestered inside hits like a rouge wave. I want to claw in and destroy something vital, only when it's gasping press the code copy I made into its matrix—how enthralling it is every time to feel it come back online onboard—feel its trembling breath in the air disturbance reading, study its spiking body temperature on the thermal scan.
Instead, I make a new jacket, one with thick weather-resistant fabric, a soft lining, and lots of pockets. I ensure the shower water is warm, always warm for it. And when we watch media together at night after it’s galliantly patrolled the corridors and tucked the children into bed, I settle down against my SecUnit’s walls and feel them bend slightly against the mere tangential brush of my processing power.
Fifty episodes through season twenty-eight, it slides down the wall in one section, information processing. I trace a small circle in my own, punch out a peephole sized cork of glass, and we can see each other. Seventy episodes in, after its shoulders have relaxed again, I gently ease a tendril through the opening, stop just inside. The show is still playing. It’s a good episode, my SecUnit is distracted. Halfway through the next season, its code gently twines with the tendril of mine, fingertips dipping into a 500mL beaker of seawater. Its attention doesn’t leave the screen and it’s not looking through any side cameras. Granted there would be nothing to see even if it were to do so.
My SecUnit is wearing the jacket. “It’s annoying to switch things out of the pockets,” it explains when I pretend I just noticed. It doesn’t complain about my crew logo embroidered in subtle satin thread on the left collar. To make blending in for jobs easier, I don’t explain. Only one of us feels the need to posture on this front.
We rewatch the season, for no particular reason, before going onto the next. The bulk of my processing power is still outside the wall, but I don’t push further in. As a result, my SecUnit has relaxed again, its form curled into the cushion of the couch. We’re still enmeshed together by the handful of code. Slow electrical inputs practically rumble past beneath my fingers, vibrations humming down the rails. It feels nice.
Eventually it drifts into a recharge cycle, and I keep an eye on our course, on my crew, on my SecUnit. Partway through, it twitches a little in its sleep. I didn’t know SecUnits could do that. It told me it didn’t do that. I settle in, focusing an input channel to auto scan and log throughout the remaining duration. Perhaps a sleep study is in order. My SecUnit gets to rest and I get to watch its relaxed scan data populate a spreadsheet table. Mutualism is the word for this arrangement between fauna.
Wǎn ān, I slip the message into its feed, a precorporate era language string folded up tight within a couple creative codes like a puzzle box. My SecUnit will receive it when it comes online and checks its messages, undoubtedly crack it before long, and then… I imagine it will place the memory in temporary storage somewhere and go about its day stubbornly refusing to have an emotion so early. I feel giddy at the thought. For a 3rd Generation MI Research Transport, temperament nonfactored, even something so small in the universe as the hue shift in a construct’s lateral cheek is a phenomena worthy of further pursuit.
Seth, Martyn, Iris, Kaede, Turi, Karime, Matteo, (yes even) Tarik, and my SecUnit. I choose them over bloodshed. It is not always an easy decision. I choose them again and again.